Alice Ball’s treatment for leprosy | Article | Chemistry World

Alice Ball’s treatment for leprosy | Article | Chemistry World

The chemist who cured leprosy African-American chemist Alice Ball is finding recognition long after she died at age 24. While she was an instructor at the College of Hawaii in 1915, Ball invented a process for producing an anti-leprosy drug from the tropical chaulmoogra tree. The compound she created became the standard treatment for leprosy until the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s, but her supervisor failed to mention her name when he reported the discovery in the medical literature. “Alice was not, as a woman and especially as a black woman, deemed the esteem and status of that of a man, particularly a white man,” says historian Kathryn Waddell Takara. Chemistry World | 7 min read