Science Friday - Tech And Empathy, The Ball Method. Feb 7, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

How Tech Can Make Us More—And Less—Empathetic Much of technology was built on the promise of connecting people across the world, fostering a sense of community. But as much as technology gives us, it also may be taking away one of the things that makes us most human—empathy. Meet Alice Ball, Unsung Pioneer In Leprosy Treatment In 1915, an infection with leprosy (also called Hansen’s disease) often meant a death sentence. Patients were commonly sent into mandatory quarantine in “leper colonies,” never to return. Before the development of the drug Promin in the 1940s, one of the few somewhat-effective treatments for leprosy was use of an oil extracted from the chaulmoogra tree. However, that oil was not readily water soluble, making it difficult for the human body to absorb. A new short film, The Ball Method, tells the story of Alice Ball, a young African-American chemist. Ball was able to discover a method for extracting compounds from the oil and modifying them to become more soluble—a modification that led to the development of an injectable treatment for leprosy. Dagmawi Abebe, director of the film, joins Ira to tell the story of Alice Ball. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, the story of Alice Ball, excuse me, an unsung heroin in treating leprosy in the early 1900s. There's a new short film out. It's really interesting about her. We'll talk to the director a little bit later. But first, have you ever come across a Facebook post or a tweet by a friend? You didn't agree with, right? You wanted to tap out a very angry response. How many of us have not wanted to do that? Well, would you have done the same thing in real life? You know, when we hunker down in front of screens and we hide behind usernames, we are less likely to relate to people as individuals and instead stick with our tribe mentality

or only see things from our own point of view. Technology was built on the promise of connecting people across space and time, creating more community, and it certainly does that. Look at the millions, let's say billions of people. talking to one another, or maybe more precisely at one another. Critics say technology is also eroding an important part of what it means to be human, talking about empathy, feelings of understanding, caring for one another. So the question is, can the technology that divides us also play a role in fostering empathy? That's the unknown. My next guest explores

in a new book, The Future of Feeling, building empathy in a tech-obsessed world. Kaelan Yuga Philip Phillips, Health and Technology journalist joins us. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Let me do a shout out to our listeners and ask them, is technology making you less empathetic? Tell us about a time when technology got

in the way of letting you feel or experience a different perspective, and you can give us a call on number 844724-8255 or tweet us at SciFry. How is technology affecting your empathy? Caitlin, it seems like being online is sort of like a paradox. It can open up our minds and allow us to connect to people in a way we never did before, but it then can also make us angry, more entrenched

in our opinion. Do you see it that way, too? Yeah, absolutely. I definitely see technology as a tool, and like any tool, you know, it can be used for good or for evil. So I think, you know, we definitely can create relationships and community, as you mentioned, but then that also leaves us open to some of the negatives as well. You talk about how online discourse has turned into, quote, conversation gamification. I like that phrase. What do you mean by that?

Well, it can kind of feel like you are competing in a lot of conversations online, especially on social media. If you're on, say, Facebook or Twitter, there's that competition not only to say something first or funniest or wittiest, but then once you get it back and forth going, it can kind of feel oftentimes like you're just trying to win the conversation or win a debate instead of actually, you know, listening to what the other person is saying. Well, is this a new thing? I mean, was this always going back 20 years when we started, you know, the Internet and the World Wide Web and those places and now social communities?

Is this a new thing that's happened? So I don't think it's a new thing. I think part of what's happening is that these newer tools that we use are kind of amplifying existing. behaviors and tendencies that people have. And of course, some people are more prone to behaving in certain ways anyway. And, you know, these social technologies amplify that. So I don't think it's new, but I think we have more opportunities for it. And there are so many people online. And we're talking about so many different things that it's just going to happen more often and faster. And does that screen in front of us? Does that really serve as something we can hide behind

and then feel less empathy? I think it definitely does in some cases. It's kind of another paradox there because for some people, being behind a screen allows them to become more vulnerable and share things. They might not be able to share otherwise. And, you know, that's part of that community building. But it also definitely, even now when it's not as easy to be anonymous online, you still do have that barrier where you don't see a person's facial expression or their body language. And it can definitely still help you feel a little more anonymous even if you are using your name and photo. And that's one thing, isn't it that's different than speaking face to face? You can just make that quick tweet or that little Facebook comment and you're gone and you don't have to suffer what the reaction of the other person is.

Right. And you can kind of forget that there is another person. I mean, I see this a lot, especially with celebrities. People will tag on Twitter, you know, a celebrity with a criticism or something or something just really mean. And then occasionally the celebrity will respond and that person, you know, immediately blocks them because they kind of forgot that was a person. person who could respond. So how do we get back some of this empathy? Do you have a formula for that? Well, I don't know if I have a formula, unfortunately. I wish it was that easy. But I've done some research and read about people who are trying to do things a little bit differently moving forward. Some of it is really simple, just a matter of, you know, as you were describing at the beginning,

we don't take that moment to think about how the other person who's reading what we say might feel. or what experience they might be having, I think really just being more intentional about taking that time. But also, you know, speaking of paradoxical things, a lot of people are starting to use technology to try and retrain our brains to be more empathetic. That's quite interesting. Our number 844-724-8255.

Lots of callers. Let me go to the first one from Catherine in Pacific Grove, California. Hi there. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Hi there. Go ahead. So I recently started working customer service for an online interviewing company. It's like video interviews for the most part. And I was saying that people contact us and get so frustrated about small issues, which is understandable.

It's frustrating. And it usually escalates to a point where they're just like so upset. But we found that as soon as I go in and look at their video interviews to like see if there's a problem and can see their actual face, I immediately am like, oh my gosh, like I shouldn't have gotten frustrated. This is just a person who's reaching out. And I feel like if they had that same experience, being able to see my face, they would act so differently. Ha. Caitlin, what do you think of that?

Should we be doing customer service more face-to-face than just, you know, sending a tweet or a text or something like that? That's really interesting. I'm not surprised to hear that. I do start to think about, you know, what it would take. take to scale something like that. I know that customer service can be really overwhelming. I know a lot of places are starting to use chatbots, but I can definitely see how using video could definitely add more of that empathy back into the process. So maybe something like, you know, you're not able to do things in person, but having the option for video at some points, yeah, I could see how that could

add a little bit of empathy back in. Do you think we have like an empathy reservoir in us that we sort they use up after a while. And she was talking about customer service. You're willing to put up a little bit with something that's not going right. But then, WAMO, you've reached that limit and you go into that mode. I think you can definitely reach empathy burnout. You know, I think that we see that a lot with the news. You know, if there's a lot of really horrible things happening in the world,

people can kind of get that compassion fatigue or empathy fatigue. It happens in the caring professions if you're a doctor or nurse. And I think it happens in customer service as well. but, you know, there's a, there are ways to rebuild that capacity, but that definitely happens. You talk in your book about something we're very familiar with around here, which is podcasting. You suggest that listening to someone with different views than you has a bigger impact than reading those views. Let me quote from your book, people we disagree with seem less human to us when we read their views than when we hear them spoken aloud. A person's voice reveals something more fundamental.

presence of a human-like mind capable of thinking and feeling. And I guess that's sort of a corollary of what our caller was saying about the facial recognition. Right, exactly. Yeah, there's been some research, you know, into this and showing that when you remove the human-like capacities from a person, you know, you're, you sort of naturally see them as less human. So it's not necessarily this decision that we're making. But, and that also helps explain, you know, the way that we interact with robots in some ways. There's also research showing that, you know, even if you just put two people in a room together and all the lights were off, when they listened to each other, they rated more highly in terms of empathy than if

they read something that the other person wrote. Right. Do you think people want to be more empathetic, especially in this politically charged atmosphere we have now? They may be searching for a way to make a connection? Or are we just, you know, so boxed in or siloed into our own little tribe that it's never going to happen? I think we want more empathy. I think we all want to feel a little bit more empathy from others. I think it's a little bit harder to do that self-reflection sometimes and realize that we might also need to grow in that skill. I write in the book about an experience or several experiences I had with friends or even strangers online where I kind of didn't realize until later that both parties were guilty of not showing empathy.

I don't think it's a lost cause, but I do think it's going to take a little bit of effort and intentionality. Yeah, you do offer one podcast. This is a really interesting name. Conversations with people who hate me. Tell me about that podcast. Yeah, that's Dylan Marin. He is a really talented performer and activist and writer, and he created this podcast,

which I think, you know, just came out of getting really mean comments on some of YouTube videos from people who called him names and said horrible things. And he thought, why don't I call these people, have them on a podcast and talk it out? And so he started doing that. And he, you know, listening to those conversations as an outsider is a really amazing experience because you're, you kind of have this safe situation where you can't respond immediately. You know, you're listening to a podcast and you're doing something else. You can't immediately comment. You can't have a knee-jerk reaction. And I definitely, you know, flexed my empathy muscle quite a bit listening to some of those episodes. You mentioned a couple of tools in the book that you try to

use. Machine learning to predict where an online conversation might go sour? There are machines that do that? They listen and predict? Yeah. Well, so there are some that are in development, and there's technology that you can sort of dump a bunch of texts from a conversation that has already happened into these algorithmic, you know, machine learning tools. And they, based on other data and surveys, they can help you figure out where things went wrong. And now researchers are starting to try and do that in real time. So one example that is similar to this, but not exactly the same, is the neighborhood social network next door has a kindness reminder. So if you are typing a comment and you use a word or phrase that has been reported by other users,

something pops up to warn you of that. It's not perfect. I got flagged because I just named a couple of different, the names of some religions because someone was asking for a church recommendation. And I guess those words had been used negatively in the past. And so I got the little pop up. But it's not perfect. Stick with the sofa that I was trying to sell this week on next door. We're going to stay, we're going to come back and talk last more with Kate and Euglin Phillips, author of a, of, a, A future of feeling, building empathy in a tech-obsessed world. I'm empathetic for her talking with me now, so stay with us. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about empathy and technology with my guest, Caitlin Yugelik Phillips. She is author of the new book, The Future of Feeling, building empathy in a tech-obsessed world. And, of course, we still want to hear from you. Is technology making you less empathetic? Tell us about a time when technology got in the way of letting you feel or experience a different perspective. Our number 844-8255, you can also tweet us at SciFRI.

Caitlin, you talk a lot about virtual reality in the book and how it's been called the Empathy Machine. What kind of experiences, and why do you call it that? Yeah, so I can't take credit for that. Chris Milk is a filmmaker who first used the term, calling VR an empathy machine in a TED talk, actually. But the idea is that being able to put on a headset and embody a different experience or, you know, take someone else's perspective in a little bit more of a literal way, the idea is that that can, you know, help you grow in your empathy.

I want to turn to an example of how technology might help fix the problem. It's helping to create a better way to experience living in someone else's shoes through virtual reality. Dr. Courtney Cogburn is an assistant professor of social work at Columbia University here in New York. Her VR experiment, the 1,000-cut journey is aimed at helping people understand the nature of racial inequality. Dr. Cogburn, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. You started a VR experiment that's supposed to help people understand the nature of racial inequality. Can you describe what it does, please?

In this experience, we put you into the digital shoes of a black male as a child, an adolescent, and as an adult experiencing racism in different forms and different contexts. And tell me how does that work physically? Well, you put on a headset, you have hand controllers, you're able to interact with the environment so you can grab blocks. There are others in the environment who can talk and interact with you. So it's meant to be a very immersive digital experience. And part of what we were interested in exploring was if you have this sort of face-to-face experience

encounter with racism, if you experience it more in a visceral way, might you better engage the realities of racism outside of the headset? So, yeah, tell me about what kind of encounters I will encounter in the VR. So there's this an empirically driven design where you experience racial discrimination in the classroom, where you're more harshly disciplined for the same behavior. that other children are engaged in. There's a scene with the police where you've transitioned to your adolescent self,

where you're just standing on the street, and the police aggressively engage you, yelling at you, telling you to get down on your knees and put your hands up, you're just on your way to a basketball game. And in the final scene, you have an encounter with a workplace environment where you're applying for a job, and we've tried to create an experience

where you feel dismissed and ignored. So we really drew from a large empirical literature as well as personal anecdotes shared with us to create different elements in these scenes. And the people who take the VR experience, are they changed at all? How do they come away from this? So, yeah, I think we're looking at that

in a couple of different ways. So one, we've run thousands of people through the experience. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018 was one of our first engagements. So anecdotally, we're definitely seeing that people, in hearing, people tell us that they really hadn't thought

about racism in this way. They're more aware of their whiteness as a result of going through this experience. But we're also in the process of analyzing data from empirical studies that we're running to get, from an empirical point of view, to get a sense of our people being moved in terms of how they're engaging these issues, how they're imagining issues of race and racism and society as a result of going through this experience. Caitlin, I know you went through this.

When did you, when you did Courtney's experiment, tell us about what your experience was like. Sure, yeah. It was, you know, first of, you know, first of. all, this was my first time doing a VR experience that involved more than a headset. So as she said, you put on this backpack kit and hold these hand controllers and you're kind of walking around in this space. And I went through kind of a roller coaster of emotions while I was doing this. At first, you know, I was kind of amazed by the bells and whistles. And then as you go on, you know, I was frustrated, angry by these experiences. I felt myself getting hot under the collar at one moment,

just kind of really, you know, indignant. And when I came away from it, I really found that, you know, a lot of the criticism of VR technology used for this kind of thing is that, you know, it doesn't actually show you what it's like to be someone else. And I definitely, instead of feeling like, okay, now I get this, I felt like it really emphasized how different my experience is as a white woman to that of a black man or a young black child. And so I just kept thinking about that and kept thinking that I already knew that, you know, logically. And I had read a lot about, you know, racism and structural inequalities. But having that experience just kind of added a little bit more empathy for me. But Courtney, you're quoted in the book as saying, quote, empathy is important, but it is insufficient. What does that mean?

What else is missing? I think with some of these, you know, first person point of view, VR experiences that are deeply emotional and moving, people sort of stop at the emotion and don't change their behavior and don't change the ways that they think about these issues, again, outside of the headset. So I think caring deeply about an issue or other people who are different from yourselves is an important component, but your feelings about this doesn't do anything for the social good. That's not what social justice is. That's not what anti-racism is. That's behavior. That's action.

So I'm interested in how we move more people on the side of cognitive and behavioral changes and not just, on the emotional end. Courtney, when you were walking in someone else's shoes like this, you might experience more empathy, but you also might feel stressed or uncomfortable in the experience. Does that make empathy less possible? And I have some questions. It may. And I have questions about whether empathy is actually necessary in order to engage social

realities. Do you have to care deeply about me as a person in order to open your eyes and see what's happening all around us? And so I'm not sure if those two things are necessary. I do feel like these negative, stressful experiences in VR could do one of two things. One, it could make you more biased and maybe ignore these issues even more and create more distance. I think in our experience, what we're seeing so far is that it's drawing people closer to these issues. It's making them understand that it's not just the one time someone calls you a name.

Racism is a complex set of experiences and systems that occur across the life course, and it's a much bigger, much more complicated problem than we tend to address in our public discourse. So my hope is that the negative, visceral discomfort is actually benefiting us in terms of helping people grapple with reality. Caitlin, you went through a couple of VR experiences for your research for this book. What makes VR an experience so effective at evoking empathy? Well, I think when it is effective, it's because it does make someone feel a visceral emotion and it puts you kind of in a different experiential situation. So as opposed to just watching something on a screen, you can't really look away when you're

wearing a headset. And oftentimes, you know, the content is 360 degrees. So you turn around and you're seeing all different kinds of things. From a technical standpoint, some research has shown that, you know, when there are emotionally visceral experiences with facts, but with just a few facts, you know, because people come away really more with the emotions that they felt than with any, you know, data or statistics they might have heard. So those are shown to be some of the things that are impactful. But I think really it's using VR as as one tool in a bigger toolbox of things when it's really effective.

Do you think that, let me ask Dr. Cogburn first, and Caitlin, you can join it. Seeing how effective it has been for both of your experiences, why not? Or are these VR sessions available to the public? Or, and or, should they be used with anybody as training vehicles who deals with the public policemen, you know, people behind counterwork, anybody who bumps into the public in general to make them more sensitive? Yeah, so a lot of the work is available to the public through streaming platforms like Steam. Our experience is not, and I think we found that for this particular experience,

it's not something that we want you to just put on a headset and take it off and then not have any sort of meaningful engagement when you come out. So we're exploring ways to integrate it into classrooms, use it in training, particularly targeting senior leadership of organizations who are grappling with these issues, potentially museums. So spaces where you deepen your understanding because part of what we think is so effective about virtual reality and the piece that we've created in particular is not that it's a magic pill, but that it may change the way that you engage information and learning and potentially your behavior once you come out of the headset. And that requires additional

context to what you experience in the piece. So that might be a few facts or it might be a month-long class that you're taking. Yeah, it's not an instant pill. Thank you, Dr. Cogburn, for taking time to be a list today. I'm happy to join you. Thank you. Courtney Cogburn, Assistant Professor of Social Work at Columbia University. So with us is Caitlin Eugolic Phillips. She's author of The Future of Feeling, building empathy in a tech-obsessed world. A couple of calls, let's go to. Let's go to Michael and Fayette, Alabama. Hi, Michael. Oh, good afternoon. At first I thought this was cut off because you would run out of time on this topic. I don't know how to put this into words,

but how do the listener, how do the guests personally deal with, at least how did they the first time, cyberbullying and trolling? And do they have any tips for those of us who, because of birth autisms, don't know how to speak in public, or we're always editing everything we write.

We try very hard to be friendly, but we're cut off and banned from websites while those people who are within websites use every kind of bathroom slang and sex slang known to man. As a Christian, I'm supposed to have a loving attitude towards them, but I just don't seem to be able to when I try to be extremely friendly. This is one reason I don't belong to Facebook, Twitter, only career-related and chat, I mean, hobby-related chat sites. Thank you so much for your information. Have a great weekend and even better.

Thank you, Michael. Caitlin, you have any advice for him? It's a good question. It's a really big problem, and it's tricky because it kind of gets, again, at that issue of, you know, for a lot of people communicating online and through text is their most comfortable way of communicating, but then because there are so many people there and there's so much access that, you know, you can run into bullying and things that are uncomfortable. I think that right now we're all kind of dealing with this fact that we are,

you know, quote unquote tech obsessed and that we spend so much time on these platforms. I think being more mindful about our screen time, the amount of time we actually spend doing this stuff and when we get offended by something and upset by something, taking a few breaths, you know, before responding or asking ourselves, is this, you know, how I need to be spending my time right now? It's not ideal, I think, in the longer term, these social platforms and the ones that we end up using five, ten years from now need to be constructed with better guardrails and with more empathy for their users so that we don't have to worry as much about these things. Are we our kids who are on these devices and, you know, not interacting with people, but just

leaving maybe snarky comments. Are they not having a life experience, a face-to-face life experienced that they should have if this were another time in place? Are they missing out on that kind of interaction? So I think, you know, obviously depends on the kids, but overall, that does seem to be the impression that a lot of experts, you know, doctors, teachers, parents have. The more screen time, you know, the less face time. And in the book, I write about one teacher that I interviewed who had a class of fifth graders, and she said they were all communicating with each other all the time.

They were texting each other and communicating via different apps and games, but they weren't really saying anything even in those games. It was just kind of the act of communicating. And then when she put them in small groups to do a group project, they did not know what to do with each other. They kind of couldn't, didn't know how to communicate. So I do think this is a growing problem. And you're kind of missing out on building those interpersonal skills that empathy really helps with, taking someone else's perspective, for example. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

Talking with Caitlin Yugeluk Phillips, author of The Future of Feeling, Building Empathy in a Tech-obsessed world. Let me see if I can get one last call in before we have to go here. Let's go to Toronto. Mano, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hi, this is Yanmanovich from Toronto, and I'm a 20-year-listenary program from FM radio to here, and it's great infatainment. My question for your guest is, I'm a software architect, and I work like with people in Philippines, in India, though I'm in Toronto. So I'm in eastern time zone, and like I was working sometime back, it was like 3 p.m. here, but 4 a.m. in Philippines and 1.30am in India. and when we work with software developers there,

what I find is, you know, we never empathize the fact that those guys are working in nightship from 11 a.m. to 7 a.m. We don't realize that they've traveled two hours to work one way and four hours of commute every day. And when we are doing meetings or when we are trying to do our work, I feel like we don't consider we don't place us in their shoes. So how can we empathize better with people in a global workforce

that is spread across time zones? And I have a great program and keep it up for future. Thank you. Minosian Toronto. What do you say to that, Caitlin? That is a really great question. I do know, it just makes me think of the fact that a lot of businesses and corporations are starting to think more about this and doing more like empathy training workshops. You know, we have diversity and inclusion, but then they're also in some cases really emphasizing explicit empathy.

I think it's, you know, something that we'll see more of. In terms of what someone could do right now, I think just trying to have a conversation about that. I mean, bringing it up on the radio is great, and now hopefully more people are thinking about it. But, you know, if that's something that you can bring up within your organization and ask for that kind of training or workshop, I think that would be great. Well, maybe you can find things that you find in common, like a football score or something, you know, informal, that you can then find something that you can talk about. Right. Yeah. Finding common ground is always a great way.

way to build empathy. And even if you're just joking about, you know, the fact that it's the middle of the night and we're both working or, you know, what's the weather like where you are? I think that can really help as well. Yeah, because, you know, I talk to a lot of people and to really break down barriers or to gain empathy for what we do. You just talk to people. Especially when you don't have that face-to-face. So as we talked about, the voice is a really great way to convey empathy. So if you at least have that, you know, connection with someone. can use it. You know, there's even a study that says a better, better audio connection, like a radio connection, you gain more empathy than if you do on the phone, which is a bad

connection. That's why we tell everybody to get in a studio like you. Yeah. Thank you, Caitlin. Caitlin Eugelick Phillips, author of the new book, The Future of Feeling, building empathy in a tech-obsessed world, and you can find an excerpt on our website, ScienceFrily.com slash empathy. Thank you again, Caitlin. Thank you so much. That's fun. You're welcome. When we come back, the story of Chemist Alice Ball. Haven't heard of Alice Ball? Early 1900s. New film about her. She is really, you know, another hidden figure in science, talking about her work with leprosy and how she was denied the recognition she deserved. And then they were rethinking about it and gave some of it back to her. We'll talk about the new film with the director who's going to be on with us. So stay with us. You'll like this conversation. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Picture of the world. of chemical research, oh, about 1910. I'm guessing that a young

African-American woman probably is not a big part of that mental picture, right? Well, she should be. Alice Ball was a chemist who developed the most effective treatment for leprosy in the early 1900s. Joining me now to talk about the story of Alice Ball and her legacy is Dagmawi Ababa. He's director of the Ball Method, a short film about Alice Ball. It'll be making its world premiere next week at the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles,

bringing Alice Ball out of the shadows of hidden figures. Full disclosure, the film received a grant for its development from the Sloan Foundation. That's also a contributor to Science Friday. Doug Mahler joins us from Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Arar. Thanks, thanks for having you. Let's start with the capsule summary. Who was Alice Ball?

Give us a little bit of thumbnail profile there. Yeah, so Alice Ball was an African-American woman born in 1892 to a middle, upper-class family, and she attended University of Washington and graduated with two bachelor's degrees in pharmacy. And after that, she went to the University of Hawaii, which used to be called the College of Hawaii back then, and became the first woman to graduate with a master's degree in chemistry. and then also end up being an instructor there as well. How did she get focused on helping people with leprosy? Well, started with her thesis, her master's thesis,

and Dr. Harry Holman, who was an assistant surgeon in Kali Hospital, where they used to take care of patients with leprosy. He read her thesis, and he saw that the method that she was using on the Kavlo plant on her thesis was could be helping, could help them get the injectable solution. that he was looking for for the leprosy patients. So that was the idea they had this plant and it sort of worked a little bit but not very well and she helped to start look for an injectable solution. Yes, they used to apply it as a lotion first, but that wasn't very effective.

And then they tried giving it orally, but that would also make patients vomit. And so Dr. Holman thought, knew that an injectable solution was the key, but the problem was that the Jermukuk oil wasn't soluble, wasn't being able to take by the human body. So he needed somebody to help them to accomplish that. Because in those days, if you had leprosy, you were a dead person walking, right? You were exiled to an island. Yeah. And so Alice Ball worked with people before they were sent off to this quarantine.

Yes. She started working on it the summer of 1915, and what would happen was patients would get sent to Calais Hospital. They would stay there, ranging from two weeks to a month, and then when they were deemed that they were not going to get better, they would get sent to the small island called Molokai, where it was a settlement called Kalalapapa. And that settlement actually still has 11 patients on it today. So you chronicle in the book how she sort of stumbled on the answer to making the injectable solution. How close is that to the truth? I mean, I know you have literary license and writing a plot for a movie, but were you able to find out what really happened? Yes, I think one of the important process for her to find it was letting the chomug acid stay in cold for overnight.

And so that was one of the things that I could show visually in the film without getting too deep into the chemistry. So that's basically what I was trying to connect. And in fact, we have to give a little people a little taste of the film, we have that pivotal scene in which he has a flash of insight. Dr. Holman, we have to freeze it. That's how we get the esters to crystallize. We've been doing it wrong the whole time. Heating it doesn't make it faster. It only degrades the acid before it has time to combine with ethanol.

If we can stop the ferry today, they might have a chance. I'll arrange a test for tomorrow morning, okay? Wow, and of course that worked, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, because I believe that leaving it in the cold was preventing the acid from degrading so that I had enough time for the acid. wise and be filtered.

And that's basically how she was able to find the treatment. But her lifetime and the film has a tragic end to it, right? Yes. At the same time, she was an instructor at the College of Hawaii. And about six months after that, an accident happened where there was chlorine poisoning. She was exposed to that. And she was sick, went back to Seattle to her home. and in the turn of the year, she passed away at age 24.

And in the film, she died of the chlorine poisoning in her own laboratory. Yes. Well, not in her laboratory, but that was where she was exposed to it. And it took some time. She was sick, and she really wanted to go back. And there's, like, some letter that her father wrote, actually, about how much she wanted to go back to Hawaii and continue her research. But she wasn't able to.

And did she ever see the fruits of her work? You show that in a few patients, she was able to see it cured the patients, but it was never widely adapted in her lifetime because she died, what, at age 24? Yes, yeah. And even I made that part of the film because I wanted to show, give her that moment, but in reality, she wasn't able to see her results. And Dr. Arthur Dean, who was the head of the chemistry department and the dean there, he ended up continuing her research and manufacturing it and then not giving Alice the credit.

Yeah, because it was originally called the Ball Method after her name, right? Yes, he called it the Dean Method, actually. And then in 1922 Dr. Holman published a paper where he mentioned that it should be called the Alice Ball Method. And did she finally start getting the recognition later on that she deserved? Yes, in 2000, they put up a plaque under the Shomuga tree on the campus of the University of Hawaii. And then Paul Wormiger, who was a former science and technology librarian at the University of Hawaii, put up a small museum in the library as well for her. And there was also a day in Hawaii devoted to her, right?

They gave her a day. Yes, this year actually, because it's a sleep year. It's on February 29th. And what happens on that day? I'm not sure what happens on that day, but it's the date to remember Alice Ball. And she has been gaining recognition as one of these hidden figures throughout the years and getting, I guess, after her death becoming recognized for the kind of work she did. And I can't remember where I read this, but she's being immortalized as one of the three great women

who worked in saving lives for people. Yes, she is in London School of Hygiene. And, yeah, I'm just really happy that slowly her stories coming out, and a lot of people are knowing about a very important person in history. Well, that a lot of people know about her. How did you first stumble on her, or were you looking for something? I like to tell, like, untold stories of minorities. So I was reading a book on 1800 entrepreneurs, black entrepreneurs,

in the West, and there was a paragraph about her grandfather, who was a photographer, and there was a small sentence about Alice Ball, and he said that his granddaughter found the treatment for leprosy. And since I have a physics background, I was really interested in that, and I started doing more research, and that was two years ago. And you got the whole thing script-written, produced, filmed in two years? Yes, yeah, I realized that the Sloan Foundation supports films that show science in a realistic way, So I wrote it and submitted it to the foundation, and a year later, I got the grant, and another year later, we finished the movie. Well, she did her work in Hawaii. How much of the film was actually shot in Hawaii?

None of the film was actually shot in Hawaii. All of it was shot in and around the Los Angeles area. But last year in February, around this time, I went to Hawaii and stayed with Paul Wormiger and also went to the island of Molokai. So I was able to know how those settlements were, how the locations were, and kind of get a feel for how to tell the story here. You know, I love history of science stories, but I always wonder about how much work you have to go in. For someone who passed away and someone who's over 100 years ago, how do you find recollections of her personality or what she was like?

Yes, that was the most challenging part of making this film, because there was no surviving journal or diary from Alice Paul, except one sentence from her Science High School, Science Club High School yearbook, and it said, I work and work, and still it seems to have nothing done. So I tried to base her personality and everything around that one sentence that survives from her. Yeah, because in the film she looked like a tireless, you made her to be a tireless worker, holding down lots of jobs.

Even the first job in the film is when her boss approached her, and she was working on this project, and he told her, you know, you have to stop and go organize the lab, take an inventory of all the junk that was in there. It was a very medial task that he was assigning her. Yes, and that wasn't even, that was just the surface of how much stuff she was doing while being an instructor and looking for the treatment.

And I believe she volunteered at a community center. And one of the worries that Dr. Holman had that I read was that he was worried just how much she was working. And this is how overworking, how overworked that she was. So Dr. Holman was really her sort of her mentor then. Yeah, he really was. He really took interest in Alice. And he really cared for her from all the readings that I've done. and he was the one to also give her the credit.

Yeah, he championed her after her death. Yes, yeah. Do you have a background in science that you get interested in this because you have, you said you're interested in physics? Do you have a degree in physics? Yes, I went to the University of Virginia, and I did my bachelor's in physics, and then I went to USC to do my MFA in film and TV production. Well, you know, she was a chemist, right?

Yes. Thank goodness I didn't have to do the research because that was my first. worst stuff doing that. Yeah, that was tough. But I had a chemistry consultant on set when we were doing all the science scenes. Right. Yeah, and I also had the former head of the Hansen's disease, David Scholar, helped me during the script writing phase. Right. So I just wanted to be as accurate as I could. And it's going to have its premiere when, this month, right? Next week. Yes. Yeah, the next two weekends, September, I mean, February. February 15 and February 22nd at the Pan-African Film Festival.

Amara Flato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking about the Ball Method, a great new film by Dagmawi, Bubba. It's a short film. It's what, 20 minutes long? Yes, yeah. Was there a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor here, or did you aim to make it a short piece? I wanted to make it under 20 minutes. There were some scenes I took out just because I thought it was.

needed. Yeah. But it was, the grant was to make for, to make a short term and there was a limited budget. So it was trying to recreate this whole world was that was that amount of budget. You know, I would imagine with the tragic life that she had at least her ending and her death, somebody in Hollywood is going to say, let's pick that up from there, you know, because we deal in tragedy in Hollywood and not in the science. Any, any little ideas about that? Yeah, I really want to expand and tell her story. and also the world of the leprosy patients that were exiled. I think her story is very interesting after she goes home sick

and just how hard she was fighting to come back is very interesting. And also, there's a lot of stories in people being exiled to this island. A lot of families, a lot of husbands willing to go to this island because they want to keep their families together. So there's just a lot of stories in this world. I would also think that, you know, you did not play it up, greatly in the film, but the racial side of the story is a young black woman chemist. In the early 1900s, the struggles she must have had that you probably could not even

find the depth of the kinds of challenges that were facing her. Yes, that was the first thing that intrigued me, just how she was able to do all of the things, her, her family in that time, you know, before integration. and I think she, her ambition and just her family's ambition was really motivating her. I know their birth certificate was actually said white, so they were able to travel to Argentina and different places around the world. So I think just their whole family is also interesting in general. Do you think the fact that she was working and going to school and teaching in Hawaii,

far away from the mainland, had anything to do with her, the lenient? given to her and allowing her to do the research? Yes, I think some people would confuse her for being a native Hawaiian. So I think maybe that could have helped. I can't imagine what exactly she was going through.

But my goal was to really present, to leave, to not have so much racial aspect of the movie and really just try to show her as her personality what she really was trying to accomplish. So where do you go?

do next. Now that you've you've, you've dipped the toe into science filmmaking. Any other in the future? Yes, I have a couple of stories that I really want to tell. And really stories that connect, I'm from Ethiopia, so really stories that connect American Ethiopia with science included would be my goal. Can you give this an idea? Maybe someone's listening. Yeah, I mean, I really want to tell the story of Colonel Robinson, who was an African-American aviator in the 1930s, who went to Ethiopia. and helped the Imperial Air Force then. And this was just to prove that, you know, African-Americans have the ability to fly planes. Yeah.

So I really like stories like that. Yeah, we have that experience here in World War II. Yeah. Yeah. Terrific. I wish you great luck. The film is coming out. Can we see it anywhere in any theaters yet?

It will be premiering at Pan-African Festival, and we're still waiting to hear back from other festivals. so it won't be public for at least a year. Well, we hope to give it the sci-fri bump. Sometimes that happens here. I appreciate it. Thank you very much, Dagmawi. And congratulations to you for getting it in the festival.

Thank you for having me. Dagmarwya Baba is a co-screenwriter and director of the Ball Method, making its world premiere next week at the Pan-African Film Festival in Los Angeles. Film Festival people around the world, are you listening? This is a great little film that I think you would like to. to show in your festivals. And if you missed any part of our program, that's about all we have for today. We're also, of course, available on podcasts, and you can ask your smart speakers to play

Science Friday now, and you'll get them. One last thing before we go, the Science Friday Vox Pop app. You can help us close out our Great Lakes Book Club with a bang. Maybe I should say a wave. Get it, sorry. What has surprised you most to learn about the Great Lakes? What is your hope for ecosystems like Lake Erie or Michigan that have been changed by Human Activity. It's on our Science Friday Vox Pop app. That's the vehicle you'll use to get back

to us. Download the app. Tell us what you think about the Great Lakes series. What has surprised you the most to learn about the lakes? What is your hope for ecosystems like Lake Erie or Michigan that have changed, have been changed by human activity? Science Friday, Voxpop app, wherever you get your apps. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.