Franz Alexander Nissl (9 September 1860, in Frankenthal – 11 August 1919, in Munich) was a German psychiatrist and medical researcher.

His assistant, Sigbert Josef Maria Ganser suggested that Nissl write an essay on the pathology of the cells of the cortex of the brain.

The burden of teaching and administration, combined with poor research facilities, forced Nissl to leave many scientific projects unfinished.

In 1918 Kraepelin again invited Nissl to accept a research position at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich.

After one year at that position, where he performed research alongside Korbinian Brodmann and Walther Spielmeyer, he died in 1919 of kidney disease.

[3] One day, for a practical joke, Nissl (who was an active campaigner against human consumption of alcohol) placed a row of empty beer bottles outside his laboratory and made sure that Kraepelin heard that he could be found lying under his desk, dead drunk.

Nissl was possibly the greatest neuropathologist of his day and also a fine clinician who popularised the use of spinal puncture,[4] which had been introduced by Heinrich Quincke.

Nissl also examined the neural connections between the human cortex and thalamic nuclei; he was in the midst of this study at the time of his death.

This is done by using various basic dyes (e.g. aniline, thionine, or cresyl violet) to stain the negatively charged RNA blue, and is used to highlight important structural features of neurons.