Alice Ball

Alice Augusta Ball was born on 24 July 1892 in Seattle, Washington. Her family later spent time in Hawaii, and she went on to earn bachelor's degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmacy at the University of Washington. She received offers to study at both the University of California, Berkeley and the College of Hawaii, and chose Hawaii.

At the College of Hawaii, now the University of Hawaiʻi, she became the first African American and the first woman to earn a master's degree in chemistry, and she became the first Black woman to teach chemistry there. Her research caught the attention of Dr. Harry Hollmann at Kalihi Hospital, who was seeking a better treatment for Hansen's disease, known as leprosy.

The traditional treatment was chaulmoogra oil, which had mixed results and was hard to use. In 1915, aged 23, Ball found a way to isolate the active fatty acids and convert them into water-soluble ethyl esters that could be injected and absorbed by the body. The technique, later called the Ball Method, was the first effective treatment for the disease.

It transformed the lives of patients. Thousands of people who had been exiled to isolation colonies such as Kalaupapa, on Molokai, were able to return home, and the method was used around the world until sulfone drugs arrived in the 1940s. Ball did not see this. She died on 31 December 1916, aged 24; some accounts cite inhaling chlorine gas in a laboratory teaching accident, while others describe an unexplained illness.

After her death Arthur Dean, the college's president, continued her work and published the results without crediting her, calling it the Dean Method. In 1922 Dr. Hollmann set the record straight and named it the Ball Method, but the university did not formally honour her for almost ninety years. In 2000 it placed a plaque by a chaulmoogra tree on campus, Hawaii marks 28 February as Alice Ball Day, and in 2007 the university awarded her its Regents' Medal of Distinction.