The man who discovered microwaves measured a flower's heartbeat in 1926

In August 1926, Jagadish Chandra Bose walked into an Oxford lecture hall carrying a snapdragon stem. He hooked it to one of his handmade instruments, told the audience they were watching the plant's heartbeat, and pointed to a tracing that rose and fell in rhythm. He soaked the stem in bromide — a sedative — and the line sagged; he held musk under it, and the line revived. The crowd, writes Ben Seal in Science History magazine, was "absorbed in the life-and-death struggle playing out before them."

Bose — India's first science professor, the man who discovered microwaves and once sent them through three stone walls to fire a loaded pistol — was convinced plants had a nervous system. His Western peers were less convinced. In 1927, the Stanford physiologist George Peirce coined the labels "Bosephile" and "Bosephobe"; The Daily Mail proposed a "society for the preservation of cruelty to metals"; the Royal Society stopped publishing him for over a decade.

In 2006, a group of biologists revived Bose's ideas under the banner of "plant neurobiology," then renamed their society after the backlash. Seal traces a debate that keeps resurfacing — researchers who say plants have agency, and those who say the metaphor has worn out its welcome.

Previously:

• The surprising intelligence of brainless organisms
• Video of plant talking to its neighbor
• Plants can tell when they're being eaten