<v Speaker 1>She was 23 years old, a young black woman, a chemist,

<v Speaker 1>teaching at a university in a place where almost no

<v Speaker 1>one who looked like her had ever stood at the

<v Speaker 1>front of a lab. And in less than a year

<v Speaker 1>of work, much of it done off the clock without pay,

<v Speaker 1>she solved a medical problem that had defeated doctors for centuries.

<v Speaker 1>She found a way to treat one of the most

<v Speaker 1>feared diseases in human history. And then she died at

<v Speaker 1>24 years old before she could publish a word of it.

<v Speaker 1>So a powerful man took her discovery, put his name

<v Speaker 1>on it, and for the better part of a century,

<v Speaker 1>the world forgot she ever existed. Her name was Alice Ball,

<v Speaker 1>and it's long past time for you to hear this story.

<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway. For Hey Dad Productions, this is Anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>For thousands of years, one word could end a person's

<v Speaker 1>life without killing them. Leprosy. what we now call Hansen's disease.

<v Speaker 1>It attacks the nerves and the skin, and in its

<v Speaker 1>worst forms, it can disfigure a person terribly. And because

<v Speaker 1>people were so afraid of it and understood it so poorly,

<v Speaker 1>the response across history was almost always the same. Banishment.

<v Speaker 1>Send the sick away. Put them somewhere the rest of

<v Speaker 1>us don't have to see. In Hawaii, that place was

<v Speaker 1>called Molokai. In Hawaii, that place was Molokai. Specifically, it

<v Speaker 1>was a remote peninsula called Kaluapapa, cut off from the

<v Speaker 1>world by cliffs and ocean. People diagnosed with leprosy were

<v Speaker 1>torn from their families and shipped there, most of them

<v Speaker 1>native Hawaiians, to live out their days in total isolation.

<v Speaker 1>For most of them, it was a life sentence because

<v Speaker 1>the only escape was death. There was one substance doctors

<v Speaker 1>had long suspected might help. It was an oil pressed

<v Speaker 1>from the seeds of the Chalmugra tree. The problem was

<v Speaker 1>that the oil was nearly useless in practice. Swallowed, it

<v Speaker 1>was so thick and bitter it made patients violently ill.

<v Speaker 1>Rubbed on the skin, it barely did anything. Injected, it

<v Speaker 1>clumped under the skin into painful abscesses that would not

<v Speaker 1>absorb into the body. For centuries, the one thing that

<v Speaker 1>might have worked simply could not be delivered into a

<v Speaker 1>human being in a form that did any good. That

<v Speaker 1>was the wall, and it had never been cracked. Alice

<v Speaker 1>Augusta Ball was born in Seattle in 1892 into a

<v Speaker 1>remarkable family. Her grandfather was one of the earliest and

<v Speaker 1>most respected black photographers in America. Her father was a lawyer,

<v Speaker 1>her mother a photographer. It was a household that valued achievement,

<v Speaker 1>and Alice was brilliant. After earning two degrees from the

<v Speaker 1>University of Washington, she went to the College of Hawaii,

<v Speaker 1>what we now call the University of Hawaii. where she

<v Speaker 1>became the first woman and the first black person to

<v Speaker 1>earn a master's degree in chemistry from that institution. And

<v Speaker 1>when they made her the college's first woman chemistry instructor,

<v Speaker 1>She was barely in her 20s. Her master's research had

<v Speaker 1>been so impressive, a detailed chemical study of a Pacific plant,

<v Speaker 1>that it caught the eye of a doctor named Harry Holman,

<v Speaker 1>who worked with leprosy patients in Hawaii. Holman believed the

<v Speaker 1>Chalmugra oil could be the key if only someone could

<v Speaker 1>solve the delivery problem. He needed a first-rate chemist, and

<v Speaker 1>he found 23-year-old Alice Ball. And she went to work.

<v Speaker 1>And let's be clear about the conditions. She was carrying

<v Speaker 1>a full teaching load. Much of this research she did

<v Speaker 1>on her own time, off duty, without pay. And in

<v Speaker 1>under a year, she cracked the problem that had stood

<v Speaker 1>for centuries. Her insight was elegant. Instead of trying to

<v Speaker 1>use the whole thick oil, she chemically isolated the active components,

<v Speaker 1>the fatty acids in the oil, and converted them into

<v Speaker 1>a form called ethyl esters. In plain language, she broke

<v Speaker 1>the oil down and rebuilt it into a version that

<v Speaker 1>could be injected into the body, and the body would

<v Speaker 1>actually absorb it, and it didn't clump into abscesses, and

<v Speaker 1>it could be delivered in a controlled, effective dose. She

<v Speaker 1>took a folk remedy that had never really worked and

<v Speaker 1>turned it into medicine. The results were... were dramatic. Patients

<v Speaker 1>treated with her method improved. Some improved so much that

<v Speaker 1>they could be released from isolation. They could finally leave Kaluapapa.

<v Speaker 1>They could go home, see their families again. For people

<v Speaker 1>who had been given that life sentence, Alice Ball's chemistry

<v Speaker 1>was an open door out of prison. Her technique became

<v Speaker 1>the most effective treatment for leprosy on earth, and it

<v Speaker 1>was the standard treatment worldwide for decades until the arrival

<v Speaker 1>of sulfone drugs in the 1940s. She had done it.

<v Speaker 1>at 23 years old, and then, at the very height

<v Speaker 1>of it, tragedy. In 1916, Alice Ball fell seriously ill.

<v Speaker 1>The most widely reported account is that she was accidentally

<v Speaker 1>poisoned in the classroom, that while demonstrating laboratory equipment to

<v Speaker 1>her students, she inhaled chlorine gas. In those days, laboratories

<v Speaker 1>had no requirement for proper ventilation hoods. Whatever the exact cause,

<v Speaker 1>her health collapsed, and on December 31, 1916, Alice Ball died.

<v Speaker 1>She was 24 years old and she had never had

<v Speaker 1>the chance to publish her breakthrough under her own name.

<v Speaker 1>The failure to publish it left the door wide open

<v Speaker 1>and a man walked right through it. The president of

<v Speaker 1>the college was a chemist named Arthur Dean. After Alice

<v Speaker 1>Ball's death, Dean took up her unpublished work, scaled up

<v Speaker 1>production of the treatment, began shipping it around the world,

<v Speaker 1>and published the findings, giving Alice no credit. Even worse,

<v Speaker 1>He renamed the whole thing after himself. He called it

<v Speaker 1>the Dean Method. The discovery of a dead 24-year-old woman

<v Speaker 1>was quietly relabeled with the name of the powerful man

<v Speaker 1>who was fortunate enough to outlive her. And for years,

<v Speaker 1>that's how it stood. Thousands of patients were treated, countless

<v Speaker 1>people were freed from isolation, and almost no one knew

<v Speaker 1>the name of the young black woman whose mind had

<v Speaker 1>made it possible. But there was one person who refused

<v Speaker 1>to let it stand, Dr. Harry Holman, the man who

<v Speaker 1>had recruited Alice. He had watched her do the work,

<v Speaker 1>and a few years after her death, he published a

<v Speaker 1>paper setting the record straight, insisting the credit belonged to

<v Speaker 1>Alice Ball and naming the technique properly. For the first time,

<v Speaker 1>the Ball method. In his account of it, he wrote

<v Speaker 1>a simple, devastating sentence about all the effort he had

<v Speaker 1>put in and gotten nowhere. After a great deal of

<v Speaker 1>experimental work, he said, Miss Ball solved the problem for me.

<v Speaker 1>For most of the 20th century, that one honest paper

<v Speaker 1>was nearly the only thing standing between Alice Ball and

<v Speaker 1>total erasure. Her name survived by a thread. It took

<v Speaker 1>decades until the turn of the 21st century. for historians

<v Speaker 1>to dig out the full story and give her back

<v Speaker 1>what was hers. Today, she's honored by the University of Hawaii.

<v Speaker 1>There's a plaque on a chalamugra tree planted on the

<v Speaker 1>campus in her memory. The state of Hawaii declared an

<v Speaker 1>Alice Ball Day. Slowly, belatedly, the world learned to say

<v Speaker 1>her name. A young woman, the granddaughter of a man

<v Speaker 1>born when photography itself was brand new, becomes a chemist

<v Speaker 1>at a time when nearly everything about the world told

<v Speaker 1>her she couldn't. She takes on a problem that had

<v Speaker 1>beaten humanity for 2,000 years, solves it in under a

<v Speaker 1>year for no pay while teaching full-time. She hands thousands

<v Speaker 1>of suffering people away home, and she dies before she

<v Speaker 1>turns 25. And her name is pried off her own

<v Speaker 1>discovery by a man who simply had the power to

<v Speaker 1>do it. She didn't live to see the cure named,

<v Speaker 1>but it has her name on it now. The Ball Method.

<v Speaker 1>That's Alice Ball. And that's Anonymous America.