Franz Christian Boll
Franz Christian Boll
Franz Christian Boll (February 26, 1849, Neubrandenburg – December 19, 1879) was a German physiologist and histologist. He was the son of Lutheran theologian Franz Boll (1805–1875).
Boll studied medicine in Bonn, Heidelberg and Berlin, and in 1870 worked at the physiological institute of Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) in Berlin. Later he became a professor at the University of Genoa, and from 1873 to 1879 was a professor of physiology in Rome. He died in Rome on December 19, 1879 at the age of 30.
Franz Christian Boll is remembered for the discovery of rhodopsin, when he noticed that the light-sensitive pigment in the rods of the retina had a tendency to fade in the presence of illumination. He published his findings in an article titled Sull'anatomia e fistologia della retina, and reported his discovery to the Berlin Academy on November 12, 1876.
His name is associated with the eponymous "Boll cells", which are basal cells in the lacrimal gland, and as a student of Max Schultze (1825–1874) at Bonn he wrote an important histological treatise on dental pulp called Untersuchungen über die Zahnpulpa.
Saturday, 13 August 2011
Source Wikipedia
Although Boll was credited as being the first person to discover Rhodopsin or Visual Purple (the photo sensitive protein that contantly regenerates after bleaching with light to produce images on the retina) Kühne was said to have produced no new knowledge about the substance apart from the novelty of the optogram, Kühne however, strongly refuted this as his study and naming of rhodopsin were quite exhaustive invoving ten‘s of species of animal.