TRANSCRIPT:
This is Consilience, a podcast from The Scientist magazine. I’m Ben Henry. Today, we’re talking with scientists about how to compare plants to animals—and whether or not we can use words we associate with animals, like learning or sex, in reference to plants.
A little more than a decade ago, Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh and five other scientists published a paper that set off a heated debate in the scientific community, a debate that never really got resolved.
Van Volkenburgh is a plant biologist at the University of Washington, and in that paper, she and her colleagues coined a new field of research: plant neurobiology.
“The fact that we could go to international symposia in biology and have to sit in animal neuro sections because there was no such thing as a plant neuro section was just getting a little annoying.”
So, calling this field plant neurobiology made a certain ...
