b. 1965 · A portrait
An Italian botanist argues plants sense and coordinate responses to their environment sophisticated enough to call a kind of intelligence, reviving Darwin's 1880 root-tip idea. Plant scientists split over what to call this.
The line above is how his claims were received — by the scientists whose job was to doubt them. It rises as a claim is tested and accepted, and the room brightens with it. It is not a verdict on truth: some accepted ideas are later overturned, and some rejected ones come back. A hollow point is a claim still open.
In his final book, co-written with his son, Charles Darwin proposed that a plant root's sensitive tip “acts like the brain of one of the lower animals,” directing the rest of the root's movement — an idea mostly forgotten for over a century.
Mancuso founded the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, reviving Darwin's root-tip idea as a research question and publishing on how root tips process signals — light, gravity, touch, chemicals — at once.
Plant physiologist Amedeo Alpi and dozens of other plant scientists published a letter in Trends in Plant Science arguing the term 'plant neurobiology' rested on loose analogies to animal nerves and brains, which plants lack, and asked what scientific gain the label added.
Mancuso still directs the lab and continues publishing on plant sensing and behavior. The underlying signaling research is accepted plant biology, but 'plant neurobiology' and the intelligence framing remain terms most plant scientists still don't use.