Heman Bekele has just been named Time's 2024 Kid of the Year. As Time writes, "His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It may take years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman, who's 15, is already spending part of every weekday working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to bring his dream to fruition.
" We interviewed Bekele last year when his work won him the grand prize in the 3M Young Scientist's Challenge , a competition that encourages kids to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems. Here's our story from 2023. Heman Bekele is not your typical high school student.
Rather than spending his free time playing video games or staring at his phone, this teenager from Fairfax, Virginia, was calling professors and conducting experiments, all to invent a product he hopes could help change the world. His goal is to create a soap that could treat skin cancer, and to make it affordable for everyone who needs it. His work won him the grand prize in this year's 3M Young Scientist's Challenge , a competition that encourages kids to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems.
Bekele's award-winning soap was inspired by his childhood in Ethiopia before moving to the United States at the age of 4. The soap delivers cancer- fighting drugs via lipid nanoparticles — which work to activate the body's immune cells to fend off cancer. Debor.