Debendra Mohan Bose (Standing, third from left) with other scientists of Calcutta University
Debendra Mohan Bose was born on November 26, 1885 in Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He was the youngest son of Mohini Mohan Bose, one of the first Indians to proceed to U.S.A to qualify himself in 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 from the University of Calcutta in first class. He worked as a research scholar under J. C. Bose for one year, during which he participated in his uncle's biophysical and plant physiological investigations.
In 1907, Debendra Mohan Bose 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 Bachelor of Science (first class) in Physics in 1912. Later, he returned to Calcutta and taught physics in the City College, Kolkata in 1913.
In 1914, Debendra Mohan Bose was appointed the 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 a Doctor of Philosophy.
In July 1919, Debendra Mohan 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 M. N. Saha) who participated at the Como conference (11–20 September 1927) held at Lake Como in Italy.
In 1938, he became the Director of Bose Institute after the death of the Institute's founder JC 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).
Debendra Mohan Bose served as the director of the Bose Institute till 1967, when his arthritis and other health problems forced him to take retirement. In the later years of his life, he became more interested in philosophy focusing on the relationship between religion and science. He died on the morning of 2 June 1975.
