A 23-year-old Black graduate student walks into a chemistry lab at the College of Hawaii in 1915 — the same year she became the first woman and first African American to earn a Master's degree from the university — and does what no scientist before her could do. She solves a medical mystery that had stumped the world for centuries.
Her name was Alice Augusta Ball. And almost nobody knows it.
Leprosy had been destroying lives and tearing families apart for thousands of years. No treatment. No hope. Just isolation and suffering. Entire communities of sick people quarantined on remote islands — out of sight, out of mind. Until Alice sat down and got to work.
What she discovered in that Honolulu lab changed everything. Her injectable extract became the most effective leprosy treatment in the world. Patients who had been exiled from society were finally getting better. Families were being reunited. Lives were being restored.
Then in 1916 — before she could see the full impact of her work — Alice died suddenly at just 24 years old.
And that's when it got worse.
A male colleague published her research. Without her name. Without her credit. Without a single acknowledgment that she had ever set foot in that lab. For years the world celebrated the wrong person while Alice Augusta Ball was quietly erased from history.
It wasn't until 1922 that another scientist finally set the record straight. But by then history had already moved on.
The University of Hawaii eventually got it right. In 2000 the Governor of Hawaii declared February 28th Alice Augusta Ball Day. The university honored her with a bronze plaque at the base of a Chaulmoogra tree on campus — the very plant that changed everything. In 2007 they went further, awarding her their highest honor, the Regents Medal of Distinction. Then in 2024 a life-sized bronze bust of Alice was unveiled inside Hamilton Library on the UH Mānoa campus — draped in a graduation cap and lei. The young woman they erased now stands in bronze, forever a graduate, forever recognized. The school that once let her name disappear now makes sure it is never forgotten.
But we can't wait for institutions to tell these stories. That's why we do it.
This Mother's Day celebrate the mothers of innovation. The women who changed the world in silence, without the applause they deserved.
She invented that. Make sure your kids know her name.
Shop the Pops Tee Shop inventor collections — wearable history for the whole family.
Innovation. Resilience. Legacy.
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