No more forgotten: Alice Ball, chemist who created a cure for leprosy

After his death, and just a year after his discovery, another scientist took credit for his work. It will be more than half a century before its history resurfaces.

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about notable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

The Day of In the year 1922, a scientific article in an obscure medical journal described a drug that would help revolutionize the treatment of leprosy in Hawaii and beyond. It would also give belated credit to the drug's developer.

The report, by Harry Hollmann, touted the therapeutic potential of chaulmoogra oil, originally a cure popular against leprosy with ancient roots in India and China. For centuries chaulmoogra tree oil was known as a nasty medicine - foul and heartbreaking in taste, it was so vile that some people refused to take it. But in his paper, Hollmann named the process that turned chaulmoogra into a 20th-century leprosy drug: the Ball Method, a simple injection that freed dozens of people in Hawaii from draconian quarantines. The Ball method was not a cure, but it was as close to it as anyone in 1922.

It was named in honor of Alice Ball, a black chemist who developed her formula in 1915 when she was 23. She had recently earned a master's degree in chemistry and was a teacher at the College of Hawaii (now the University of Hawaii) in Honolulu.

Her method became the treatment most widely used against leprosy in the pre-antibiotic years of the 1920s and 30s. Modified chaulmoogra oil, based on the Ball method, was distributed worldwide and helped free countless people from the colonies isolated lepers. (Injections would eventually fall out of favor with the emergence in the late 1930s of sulfa drugs, the first class of antibiotics ever developed.) ‌‌

For about 20 years, When the Balloon Method was all the rage, few people outside of the small college in Hawaii knew that a black woman had developed it, and hardly anyone even called it the Balloon Method. Ball died suddenly before she could publish her findings. The research she left at the university was fair game for people who wanted to claim her breakthrough as their own.

"Two men stole her work and did not give full credit for his contributions – especially Arthur Dean, who was president of the College of Hawaii, and Richard Wrenshall, professor of chemistry,” said Sibrina Collins, executive director of the Marburger STEM Center at Lawrence Technological University at Michigan, in a telephone interview.

"They published a 1920 article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and a second 1922 article" - in Public Health Reports - "with her research and failed to mention her or list her contributions," added Collins, who has a doctorate in chemistry and has written extensively on black scientists, including Ball.

Arthur Dean, a chemist with a doctorate from Yale, capitalized on Ball's research by giving it his name: the Dean Method. He also produced the drug in large quantities at the College of Hawaii, shipping it domestically and internationally. The chaulmoogra business was his first and only foray into pharmaceutical chemistry.

It took more than half a century for Ball to receive credit for his work . Hollmann, a physician and bacteriologist, served as his first public advocate.

In 1915, Hollmann was the acting assistant surgeon at the Leprosy Investigation Station in Hawaii when he received a copy of Ball's master's thesis, a 44-page analysis of the chemical properties of the kava plant. He contacted Ball and asked if she would be willing to tackle another complicated riddle: the mystifying chemistry of chaulmoogra.

The legendary oil is produced by the seeds of Hydnocarpus wightianus, a tree native to Asia. When people took it orally, they got nauseous. In ointment form, its viscosity hindered absorption. Injection of the unprocessed oil caused it to ulcerate the skin, further disfiguring those whose skin was already damaged by leprosy.

Ball accepted the Hollmann's challenge and, in a series of arduous but ele...