Science: Wounded Beans

That plants have “emotions,” “heart beats,” feel pain, were theories of the late Hindu Botanist Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. Every gardener knows that “wounded” plants heal themselves with mysterious juices. Last summer, Chemist James English Jr. and James Frederick Bonner, working at the California Institute of Technology with famed Dutch Plantman Aire Jan Haagen-Smit, announced that they had solved the mystery of that healing juice. In a kitchen-simple experiment, they butchered a batch of fresh Kentucky Wonder string beans, dribbled the hormone-rich juice into the pod-linings of other wounded beans. In a few hours, large clumps of healthy new cells piled up. After painstaking analysis, they isolated a complicated compound containing oxalic acid, a common plant substance.

Last week the California scientists announced artificial production of the hormone. When tested on bruised potato tubers, “traumatic acid” (from the Greek trauma meaning wound) “was found to be identical with the natural product.”