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 recordings of what he read as botanical sensation. He wrote Response in the Living and Non-Living in 1902 and The Nervous Mechanism of Plants in 1926, founded the Bose Institute in 1917 - Asia's first interdisciplinary research centre - and ran it until his death in 1937. A crater on the Moon carries his name.