Alice Ball and the Chaulmoogra Tree
Emily Ellis
Humans have always relied on plants to cure what ails us, and in modern times, the task of identifying and manipulating those mysterious properties has fallen to scientists. While this work is ongoing, there have been occasions throughout history when researchers have made life-saving breakthroughs in the plant sciences, even when faced with unjust barriers due to their gender or race. One such researcher was Alice Ball, a young chemist whose experiments with oil from the chaulmoogra tree (Hydnocarpus wightianus) brought about the world’s first viable treatment for leprosy.
In celebration of International Day of Women and Girls in Science this year, we’re sharing the remarkable story of Ball and her work with chaulmoogra oil. Scroll down to read more.
While leprosy may seem like a rare and archaic ailment today, it was a devastating and highly contagious disease throughout much of history. Also known as Hansen’s Disease, it is an infection caused by a bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae that can cause crippling nerve damage and large skin lesions. Often, victims of the disease were quarantined in “colonies” due to leprosy’s the highly contagious nature, shunned by society and shut away from their friends and families. Despite modern advances, thousands of people who are unable to access necessary medical treatment still suffer from the disease today.
One of the only somewhat effective historical treatments for leprosy was the application of chaulmoogra oil: a substance derived from the seeds of a tropical evergreen in the Achariaceae family that is widespread throughout Asia. The active compound in the oil is hydnocarpic acid, which inhibits the growth of mycobacteria and was also used to treat the skin conditions psoriasis and eczema.
A doctor giving a chaulmoogra injection in the 1920s.
While chaulmoogra had been used in Chinese and Indian herbal medicine as a leprosy treatment for many centuries (with limited success), Western scientists only began experimenting with the plant around the turn of the nineteenth century. They found that its use presented several problems. For one thing, taking chaulmoogra oil orally induced extreme nausea, making prolonged treatment nearly impossible; for another, injecting it under the skin (a common treatment during that time) resulted in painful, bubble-like rows of blisters due to the way the viscous oil settled. The oil needed to circulate through the body to be fully effective - and it was Ball, then a recent graduate and chemistry professor at the University of Hawai’i, who figured out how to make it do so.
Alice Ball was born in 1892 in Seattle, Washington to a family of four. Her father, James, was a lawyer and editor of the newspaper The Colored Citizen; her mother, Laura, was a photographer. Her grandfather, James Sr., was also an acclaimed photographer and an early user of daguerreotypy; it has since been suggested that Alice first developed an interest in the sciences after watching that chemical process.
Ball at her graduation from the University of Hawai’i. Public Domain Image downloaded from Wikipedia.
After excelling in the sciences in high school, Ball entered the University of Washington, graduating with degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry in 1912 and pharmacy in 1914. She published her undergraduate research in the Journal of the American Chemical Society - a prestigious academic journal that rarely accepted work from Black or female authors, let alone one as young as Ball.
Ball chose the University of Hawai’i for her master’s degree (a state where her family had lived briefly when she was a child), and upon her graduation in 1915, became the first Black black and female student to obtain a master’s degree in chemistry from the university and its first Black and female chemistry professor.
Around the time of Ball’s graduation, her thesis research on extracting properties from Kava roots - another historical medicinal plant - caught the attention of Dr. Harry Hollman, a surgeon and public health official. He recruited Ball to work on the “chaulmoogra problem” - finding a way to make the tricky oil effectively circulate through the body of leprosy patients.
The seed of Hydnocarpus wightianus
Ball was said to have worked arduously on her task, teaching at the university by day and studying chaulmoogra oil by night. In less than a year, she had solved the puzzle that had confounded many older and more experienced chemists. Her technique - now known as the “Ball Method” - involved freezing the oil’s fatty acids in order to isolate ester compounds, creating a substance that retained the plant oil's medicinal properties and was absorbed by the body when injected.
For the next twenty years until other drugs were invented, Ball’s injectable oil would become the world’s primary leprosy treatment, saving many lives and permitting thousands of isolated and stigmatized patients to return to their families. In 1918, it was reported that 78 leprosy patients were discharged from Hawai’i’s Kalihi Hospital after treatment with the new injectable oil.
Tragically, Ball didn’t live to see the results of her work, or even to publish it. The brilliant young chemist died at the age of 24, less than a year after making her discovery. While her cause of death is disputed, with some attributing it to illness brought on from exhaustion due to the intense research, her obituary stated that passed away from chlorine gas inhalation after accidentally inhaling the substance during a class she was teaching.
After Ball’s death, the University of Hawai’i’s president, Arthur L. Dean, took over her work, publishing her findings under his own name (calling it “The Dean Method”) and producing large quantities of the in-demand injectable oil without so much as mentioning its true inventor. Ball’s name and legacy might have been lost to history were it not for a 1922 article published by Hollmann, which repudiated Dean’s claims and made it clear that Ball was the true creator the chaulmoogra solution.
Only over the past two decades has Ball received due recognition for her achievements. In 2007, the University of Hawai’i posthumously presented her with its Medal of Distinction, and in 2018, it established the “Alice August Ball Scholarship” for outstanding students in the sciences. A plaque dedicated to Ball currently stands, fittingly, beneath’s the university’s only chaulmoogra tree.
Want to learn more about Alice Ball? Check out the recent documentary, “The Ball Method,” which premiered in in February 2020 at the 28th Annual Pan African Film Festival.
To learn about some of history’s other great female plant scientists, check out our Google Arts and Culture Exhibit, “The People and Plants Shaping Modern Medicine.”
***Banner Image: “Hydnocarpus Polyandra Blanco” in Flora de Filipinas by Manuel Blanco (1887-1892). Hydnocarpus polyandra blanco is a synonym for Pangium edule, another tree in the Achariaceae family. Learn more about this species at Kew Science’s Plants of the World Online.
Other images from Wikimedia Commons.
(Thanks to Kim and Tony from the Oak Spring Garden Library for their help with this post!)