{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"The Ball Method","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/69304179d6bc23eda246da43/c2a2b6c7-6f05-4953-957f-adaefb2ccb88.jpg?height=200","description":"Leprosy had tormented humanity for millennia. The only treatment — chaulmoogra oil — was so thick and bitter that patients vomited it up, and injecting it caused painful pustules. Alice Ball, the first woman and first Black American to earn a chemistry master's degree from the University of Hawaii, was approached in 1915 by Dr Harry Hollmann of the Leprosy Investigation Station. She was 23. Within months, she had solved the problem that had defeated every chemist before her: she isolated the active fatty acids from chaulmoogra oil and converted them into water-soluble ethyl esters that could be injected safely. By 1920, the 'Ball Method' had enabled 78 patients in Honolulu to leave quarantine and return home. Then Ball died — of accidental chlorine gas inhalation in her laboratory — before she could publish. The president of the College of Hawaii published her findings under his own name, calling it the 'Dean Method.' It took over 50 years, and the efforts of a single scholar, to restore her name to her discovery.","author_name":"Atween Studios"}