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1837 Born Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne, a German physiologist (Hamburg, 28 March 1837 – Heidelberg, 10 June 1900). After attending the gymnasium in Lüneburg, he went to Göttingen, where his master in chemistry was Friedrich Wöhler and in physiology Rudolph Wagner. Having graduated in 1856, he studied under various famous physiologists, including Emil du Bois-Reymond at Berlin, Claude Bernard in Paris, and KFW Ludwig and EW von Brücke in Vienna. At the end of 1863 he was put in charge of the chemical department of the pathological laboratory at Berlin, under Rudolf Virchow; in 1868 he was appointed professor of physiology at Amsterdam; and in 1871 he was chosen to succeed Hermann von Helmholtz in the same capacity at Heidelberg. Kühne's original work falls into two main groups, the physiology of muscle and nerve, which occupied the earlier years of his life, and the chemistry of digestion, which he began to investigate while at Berlin with Virchow. In 1876, he discovered the protein-digesting enzyme trypsin. He was also known for his research on vision and the chemical changes occurring in the retina under the influence of light. Using the "visual purple" (or rhodopsin), described by Franz Christian Boll in 1876, he attempted to make the basis of a photochemical theory of vision, but though he was able to establish its importance in connection with vision in light of low intensity, its absence from the retinal area of most distinct vision detracted from the completeness of the theory and precluded its general acceptance. Kühne also pioneered the process of optography, the generation of an image from the retina of a rabbit by applying a chemical process to fix the state of the rhodopsin in the eye. Later, Kühne attempted his technique on the eye of a convicted murderer from Bruchsal, Germany with inconclusive results. He was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1898. He is best known today for coining the word enzyme.