Debendra Mohan Bose

Debendra Mohan Bose (26 November 1885 – 2 June 1975) was an Indian physicist who made contributions in the field of cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity and neutron physics. He was the first to discover mesons with Bibha Chowdhuri and was the longest serving Director (1938–1967) of Bose Institute. Bose was the nephew of the famous physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose, who laid the foundations of modern science in India.

Debendra Mohan Bose was born in Calcutta (present day Kolkata) in a famous Brahmo family. He was the youngest son of Mohini Mohan Bose, one of the first Indians to proceed to USA to qualify himself in field of homeopathy. Ananda Mohan Bose was his paternal uncle, while Jagadish Chandra Bose was his maternal uncle. After his father's untimely death, Debendra's education was supervised by his uncle J. C. Bose.

Debendra's plan of getting a degree in engineering from the Bengal Engineering College, Shibpur was cut short when he suffered a severe malaria attack. Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a close friend of J. C. Bose, suggested him to pursue physics instead. In 1906, Debendra Bose obtained his Master of Arts degree from the University of Calcutta in first class. He stood first in the order of the merit in the examination. He also obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from Calcutta University. He worked as a research scholar under Jagadish Chandra Bose for one year, during which he participated in his uncle's biophysical and plant physiological investigations.

In 1907, he joined the Christ's College, Cambridge, and worked with prominent physicists including J. J. Thomson and Charles Thomson Rees Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1910, he joined the Royal College of Science in London, from where he obtained a diploma and a BSc (first class) in Physics in 1912. Later, he returned to Calcutta and taught physics in the City College, Kolkata in 1913.

In 1914, D M Bose was appointed the Rashbehary Ghosh Professor of Physics in the newly founded Calcutta University College of Science. He was awarded the Ghosh Travel Fellowship for studying abroad, and chose to study advanced physics for two years at the Humboldt University in Berlin. In Berlin, Debendra was assigned to Professor Erich Regener's laboratory. His stay in Germany got extended to five years due to World War I. During this period, he worked on the development of a new type of cloud chamber, and was successful in photographing the tracks of recoil protons produced during the passage of fast moving alpha particles in the chamber. The results of his preliminary investigations were published in the journal Physikalische Zeitschrift in 1916 (a full paper was later published in Zeitschrift für Physik in 1922). He returned to India in March 1919 after obtaining his PhD.

In July 1919, D. M. Bose re-joined the Calcutta University as Rashbehary Ghosh Professor of Physics. In 1932, he succeeded Professor C. V. Raman as the Palit Professor of Physics. He was one of the only two Indian physicists (the other being Meghnad Saha) who participated at the Como Conference (11–20 September 1927) held at Lake Como in Italy. The conference featured 60 invited participants from 14 countries, including 11 Nobel laureates.

D. M. Bose encouraged several of his junior colleagues at the Calcutta University to pursue research. He gave Satyendra Nath Bose two books of Max Planck, Thermodynamik and Warmestrahlung (unavailable in India then). This led to S. N. Bose's interest in Planck's hypothesis and his deduction on a combinatorial basis of Planck's formula in 1925.

In 1938, D. M. Bose became the Director of Bose Institute after the death of the institute's founder J. C. Bose. In 1945, Bose was inducted as a nuclear chemistry expert in the Atomic Energy Committee of CSIR. The committee later became the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).