Born: 24 July 1892, United States
Died: 31 December 1916
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
African-American chemist Alice Augusta Ball developed the “Ball Method”, the most effective treatment for leprosy of the early 20th century, but her work went unrecognised for many years because her white, male advisor stole her work after her untimely death at age 24. Ball was also the first woman and first African-American to receive a Master’s degree at the University of Hawai’i, and to be a chemistry professor there.
Ball was born in Seattle in 1892, one of four children in a middle-class family. Despite both of her parents being prominent members of the African-American community, they are listed as “white” on her birth certificate, possibly to help her “pass” in white society later in life. The family moved to Honolulu in 1902, but returned to Seattle in 1905. Getting top grades in the sciences, Ball graduated from Seattle High School in 1910 and went on to earn two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Washington (pharmaceutical chemistry in 1912, pharmacy in 1914).
With her teacher, she published an article on “Benzovlations in Ether Solution” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society – an uncommon achievement for a woman, particularly a woman of color, at the time. She was offered several scholarships after graduating and show to earn her Master’s in chemistry from the University of Hawai’i (then called the College of Hawaii). For her thesis, she studied the Kava plant, which was used to treat anxiety and other conditions. Because of this, she was later approached by Harry T. Hollmann, an Acting Assistant Surgeon at the US Public Health Service’s Leprosy Investigation Station in Hawaii. At this time, leprosy was highly stigmatised, and patients were sent to the Hawaiian island of Molokai to be quarantined until they died. Hollmann asked Ball to study the properties of chaulmoogra oil, which had been the best available treatment for leprosy for centuries and was derived from the seeds of India’s Hydnocarpus wightignus tree. Although it had been used medicinally as early as the 1300s, it was too stocky to be effective topically, and too viscous to inject, as it would clump under the skin, forming blisters rather than being absorbed. It couldn’t be ingested, because the acrid taste often made the patients vomit it back up.
Ball solved the problem when she was just 23, developing a technique by isolating ester compounds from the oil and chemically changing them to produce a substance that kept the medicinal properties, to make an injectable version of the oil that the body could absorb.
Unfortunately, Ball was not able to publish her findings before her 1916 death at age 24 due to an unknown illness, for which she’d returned to Seattle for treatment. Arthur L. Dean, her study advisor, dean of the college and later president of the university, took her research, conducted additional trials and published the work without acknowledging Ball in any way. He called it the “Dean method.” By 1919, a University chemistry lab was producing large quantities of the injectable chaulmoogra extract. In 1920, a Hawaii physician published a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that 78 patients had been released from Kalihi Hospital by the board of health examiners after receiving Ball’s treatment. Although it couldn’t cure or indefinitely stop the progress fo the disease, it was the only effective treatment for leprosy until sulfonamide drugs were developed in the 1940s.
Ball’s colleague Harry T. Hollmann published a paper in 1922 crediting Ball and referring to the technique as Ball’s method. Although Dean tried to claim that his work refined Ball’s, Hollmann compared the two and could find no improvement – in fact, he argued that hers was superior. He wrote, “I cannot see that there is any improvement whatsoever over the original technic as worked out by Miss Ball. The original method will allow any physician in any asylum for lepers in the world, with a little study, to isolate and use the ethyl esters of chaulmoogra fatty acids in treating his cases, while the complicated distillation in vacuo will require very delicate, and not always obtainable, apparatus.”
It was only in the 1970s that University of Hawai’i professors Kathryn Takara and Stanley Ali discovered records of Ball’s work and began the first for recognition for her. The University finally dedicated a plaque to her in 2000, on the school’s only chaulmoogra tree. The state’s lieutenant governor, Mazie Hirono, declared 29 February Alice Ball Day; Governor David Igae made it official and annual in 2022 with a proclamation that 28 February would now be Alice Augusta Ball Day in Hawaii. In 2007, the University Board of Regents awarded Ball a Medal of Distinction, the school’s highest honor, but students have questioned why more has not been done to address Dean’s actions, proposing that Dean Hall be renamed for Ball.