Jagadish Chandra Bose

Born in 1858 in Mymensingh, Bengal Presidency, Bose started in medicine at the University of London but his health forced a pivot to physics under Lord Rayleigh at Cambridge. He returned to Presidency College, Calcutta, where racial discrimination and threadbare funding didn't stop him from pioneering work in radio microwave optics — he was the first to use semiconductor junctions to detect radio waves. Then he turned to plants. Using his own invention, the crescograph, he measured how they responded to stimuli and argued for a parallelism between plant and animal tissue, producing automatic r…