Alice Ball, Chemist & Inventor of ‘Ball Method’ to Treat Leprosy

Alice Augusta Ball was born in Seattle on July 24, 1892 to James Presley and Laura Louise Howard Ball. She attended Seattle High School, graduating in 1910, and received top grades in the sciences. She then studied chemistry at the University of Washington, where she proceeded to earn a bachelor’s degree in both pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy. While studying, she published an article in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society called “Benzoylations in Ether Solution” with her pharmacy instructor, a rare accomplishment for a woman, let alone a woman of colour. She then moved to the University of Hawaii to get a master’s degree in chemistry, after being offered scholarships to the University of California Berkeley, University of Hawaii and more. This is where she first studied chaulmoogra oil’s chemical properties. She became both the first African American and first woman to graduate from the University of Hawaii with a master’s degree, and then became the first African American and female chemistry professor at their chemistry department.

At the time, leprosy was highly stigmatized and there was little to no chance of recovery. Patients were exiled to Molokai in Hawaii to die. She was offered a position as an assistant to Dr Harry T. Hollmann to help develop a method of treatment. Chaulmoogra oil was already used to treat leprosy, but it was too sticky and formed blisters under the skin. One of her biggest breakthroughs was being able to make it injectable in ester ethyl form, as it was water soluble and could dissolve in the blood. This method of making the oil injectable became known as the “Ball Method”. Her research and development of the Ball Method was so successful that over 8,000 leprosy patients could be discharged from hospitals and isolation facilities to return to their families.

Unfortunately, Ball died at the young age of 24 in a lab teaching accident, so she did not get to see the full impact of her discovery. To add insult to injury, the president of the College of Hawaii, Dr. Arthur Dean, continued her research without giving her any credit. However, in 1922, Dr. Harry T. Hollmann published a paper that set the record straight and credited Ball for the discovery.

In 2000, former Lieutenant Governor of Hawaii Marie Hirono declared February 29th “Alice Ball Day.” In 2007, the University of Hawaii awarded her the Regents’ Medal of Distinction. Additionally, in 2017, the Alice Augusta Ball scholarship was created to support students in the University of Hawaii-Mānoa’s College of Natural Science for degrees in chemistry, biology, and microbiology. While her work saved thousands of lives, multi-drug treatments eventually became available in the 1970s which are still used up to this day. While she may have died young, never seeing the true impact of her work firsthand, her work lives on through her leprosy developments that have had a profound impact on the life quality of leprosy patients as they can be treated with their families.

by Daisy O’Connor

References

Alice Ball. (2020). Biography. Retrieved from https://www.biography.com/scientist/alice-ball

Alice BALL. History of Scientific Women. Retrieved from https://scientificwomen.net/women/ball-alice-121

Alice Ball. Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Retrieved from https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/alice-ball