JC Bose Among New Nominees for UK’s New £50 Bill

The Bank of England has said that Indian physicist and physiologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was among hundreds of scientists nominated in the first stage of the Bank’s search for a new face to feature on a new £50 note to go into circulation from 2020.

Born in Bengal during the British Raj in 1858, Bose is known for proving that animals and plants share much in common as a result of his very early experimentations and the creation of a very sophisticated instrument called the crescograph to detect minute responses of living organisms, PTI reported.

Bose has been nominated alongside Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s best-known physicists, who died earlier this year, as the Bank of England or the Bank as it known, announced that it had received 174,112 nominations after it confirmed that the new note would feature a scientist who had made a significant contribution to British science, the news agency wrote.

The Bank of England said in a statement that this is only the preliminary stage of identifying eligible names. At this first stage, a nomination has been deemed eligible person is real, deceased and has contributed to the field of science in the UK in any way.

Bose graduated with a degree in Physics from Calcutta University. He later attended the University of Cambridge and studied natural sciences. He returned to India in 1884 after completing his BSc degree and was appointed Professor of Physical Science at Presidency College in Calcutta, now called Kolkata.

In 1917, Bose left his professorship and established the Bose Institute at Kolkata, which was initially devoted principally to the study of plants, PTI reported.

Other than Bose and Hawking, other people in the list are former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, computing pioneers Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and astronomer Patrick Moore, Penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming, father of modern epidemiology John Snow, naturalist, and zookeeper Gerald Durrell, and fossil pioneer Mary Anning, and British-Jamaican nursing pioneer Mary Seacole, PTI wrote.

Until the criteria was finalized, a campaign to feature British Indian World War II spy Noor Inayat Khan on the redesigned bill was launched.

An online petition in favor of Khan attracted thousands of signatures, calling for the descendant of Tipu Sultan and daughter of Indian Sufi saint Hazrat Inayat Khan to be considered as the first ethnic minority British woman to be honored on the currency, PTI reported.