Meet the Black teenager fighting cancer — with the soap he invented

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Before he was old enough to start kindergarten, Heman Bekele began using dishwashing liquid and other household chemicals to see what concoctions he could whip up.

At age 7, Heman’s parents gave him a chemistry set for his birthday — and things got a bit more serious. He’d already started learning about chemical reactions online, so he got inventive and mixed the kit’s sodium hydroxide with aluminum to produce heat.

“I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he told TIME magazine.

His curiosity and desire to make the world a better place through chemistry resulted in a first-place finish in the 3M Company’s 2023 Young Scientist Challenge — and made him the winner of TIME magazine’s 2024 Kid of the Year. The rising 10th-grader created a compound-based soap to treat skin cancer.

The magazine said Heman’s “ambition” and “selflessness” earned him the recognition.

“I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research,” Heman told TIME. “It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to make a direct impact on somebody else’s life.”

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Heman and his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was 4 years old. Even at that young age, the budding scientist remembers seeing laborers working in the hot African sun without skin protection.

In the U.S., Heman began hearing about the dangers of the sun’s ultraviolet rays and the damage it can cause — including skin cancer. It is the most common cancer in the United States, but the disease is treatable, especially if it’s caught early.

A few years ago, Heman read about imiquimod — a multi-use drug approved to treat one type of skin cancer — and wondered if it could be an effective, simple treatment for early-stage patients. His logic was simple: “Almost everyone uses soap and water.” 

So, he got to work, developing an imiquimod soap, winning the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, with a $25,000 prize, in the process.

This summer, Heman worked part-time in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore to refine the product. Over the next five years, he hopes to create a nonprofit organization that can distribute the soap to communities in need.

Deborah Isabelle, a 3M engineer and Heman’s mentor during the Young Scientist Challenge competition, said the TIME Kid of the Year honor was well deserved.

“Heman is an incredibly charismatic, curious, intelligent, articulate young man,” Isabelle said. “But more than that, he’s compassionate and has a heart for people. He’s created an invention that has the potential to make the world better for so many people.”

This story appeared at wordinblack.com on Aug. 28, 2024.