Two scientific Boses who should have but never won Nobels

Einstein’s young collaborator Satyendra Nath Bose (1894-1974) should have been a winner, and has the Boson particle and Bose-Einstein statistics named after him.

Much before him, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) deserved to win in two fields: physics and medicine. Marconi and Braun shared the 1909 Physics Prize “for development of wireless telegraphy” – but this was an achievement in which Bose shared more than equally though he was deprived of due honour and recognition, his work coming to light only in the last decade. In Physiology/Medicine, Bose’s work was so far ahead of his time it seemed controversial to lesser men. He introduced new delicate instruments, one of which, the crescograph magnified small movements in plant growth 10 million times. Among his numerous other contributions were demonstration of a parallelism between plant and animal tissues. I should declare an interest as JC Bose was a friend of my great grandfather’s, and his visits to our home are still remembered by my father, now in his 90s. I said in 2007 about him “had Bose been less of a great scientific soul and even slightly more of a businessman than he was by temperament and character, he should have been a winner too”.