Franz Christian Boll

Franz Christian Boll was a German physiologist and histologist, born in Neubrandenburg on 26 February 1849 and died in Rome on 19 December 1879 at the age of thirty. The son of the Lutheran theologian Franz Boll, he studied medicine at Bonn, Heidelberg and Berlin, and in 1870 worked at Emil du Bois-Reymond's physiological institute in Berlin. He later became a professor at the University of Genoa and from 1873 to 1879 was professor of physiology in Rome. Boll is remembered for the discovery of rhodopsin: he noticed that the light-sensitive pigment in the rods of the retina tended to fade in the presence of light, and he published his findings in the pamphlet Sull'anatomia e fisiologia della retina in 1877. His name is also attached to Boll cells, basal cells described in the lacrimal gland, and as a student of Max Schultze at Bonn he wrote a significant histological treatise on dental pulp. He married the chemist and activist Margarete Traube, a daughter of the physician Ludwig Traube.