Who was Alice Ball?

A chemist who developed the first effective treatment for leprosy — at 23, in about a year — and who died before publishing it, after which her work was taken and published by the man who had been her supervisor, under his own name.

The problem she solved. Chaulmoogra oil had been used for leprosy for centuries and was almost unusable in practice: too thick and sticky to inject, causing painful abscesses; ineffective when swallowed, being vomited or poorly absorbed; and ineffective applied topically.

What she did. Working at the College of Hawaii, she developed a method of isolating the active ethyl esters of the oil's fatty acids and making them water-soluble and injectable. This became known as the Ball Method, and it was the standard treatment — giving genuine relief and allowing many patients to leave forced isolation — until sulphone drugs arrived in the 1940s.

Her background. She was the first woman and the first African American to receive a master's degree from the College of Hawaii, and became its first woman and first African American chemistry instructor.

What happened next. She became ill — reportedly from a laboratory exposure — and died in 1916 at 24, before publishing.

Arthur Dean, the college president and a chemist, continued the work, published it, and named the process after himself. He did not credit her.

The correction came from one person. Another physician, Harry Hollmann, who had originally asked for the work, published a paper explicitly crediting Ball and naming the method after her. Without that single intervention her name would have disappeared entirely, which is the part of the story worth sitting with.

Recognition took most of a century. University researchers recovered her story in the 1970s and afterwards; a plaque was placed at the university in 2000; and Hawaii now marks Alice Ball Day.

Her case is frequently cited in discussions of how contributions are attributed, because the mechanism is unusually well documented rather than merely suspected.