Bharatiya Pragna - Dr. Th Chowdary

truth to maintain a spirit of absolute detachment
and perfect freedom of mind from all preconceived
bias. The hardest struggle is to protect
oneself from being self-deceived and one has to
guard against it and keep vigilant all the time.
The Wide Vista
It was after repeating every one of the
innumerable tests by which animal life is usually
differentiated that I was able to prove that the
phenomenon of life, with all its multiplex variations,
is identical in plant and in animal. In other
words all life is One. This identity has been
proved to be so real that after discovering some
new reactions in plants I have been able to predict
its occurrence, hitherto unsuspected, in the
animal; and my predictions have come out invariably
true. The unexpected revelation in the
life of plants have opened out vast fields of inquiry
in Physics, in Physiology, in Agriculture, in
Medicine, and even in Psychology. Many problems,
long regarded as insoluble, have been
brought within the region of experimental investigation.
In Physiology the new inquiry is concerned
in the determination of the characteristics
of life and death, and in unraveling the mystery
of automatism. In Medicine it deals with
the fundamental reaction of drugs on protoplasm
itself by which its practice is raised from empiricism
to science. It tries to solve the anomaly of
an identical drug inducing two opposite effects
on different individuals. In Psychology a new
chapter has been opened out by the discovery
of nervous impulse in plants. Certain new phenomenon
discovered in plant-nerve shows that
the intensity of the nervous impulse which colors
our sensation, as pleasure or pain, is not solely
determined by the intensity of the external blow,
but that the character of the sensation is capable
11
150th Birth Year
of being modified ac- Tribute
cording to the predisposition which can be imparted
to the vehicle that carries the sense-bearing
message.
India’s Temple of Science
Are our universities to be content in
merely turning out graduates whose knowledge
of an alien language and efficiency in other imitative
arts, have roused certain amount of goodnatured
astonishment among foreign critics?
Those days of tolerant appreciation are now
happily passed away. You have to pass a far
severer test, and by your own work you have to
win the recognition of the world. The civilized
nations have in modern times each made notable
contributions for the world’s advancement. What
new and original store have you contributed, and
what steps have you taken that your contributions
do not remain sporadic or uncertain?
I have spoken of the new lines of investigations
which have had their birth in India and
which will contribute materially to the intellectual
advancement and further the welfare of humanity.
Will these advances made in various
branchs of science — in Medicine, in Agriculture
and in Biophysics — benefit only India or
the whole world ? Shall these then remain the
offering of an individual worker, to come to an
end with him, or shall there rise a school of science
to hold the meed of recognition which has
so hardly been won, and maintain a continuous
and glorious tradition of India’s gift to the world
in the realm of science ?
Very little serious arid intelligent thought
has been given to this question which is one of
the most important problems for shaping the future
destiny of our country. It has been supposed
that for the success of research all that is neces-
November & December 2008 Bharatiya Pragna