HEman Bekele mixed the most dangerous of his “magic potions” when he was just seven years old. By then, he had already been conducting his own scientific experiments for about three years, mixing together whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if anything would emerge from the resulting mixture.
“It was just dishwashing liquid, laundry detergent and common household chemicals,” he says today about the ingredients he used. “I hid them under my bed and saw what happened if I left them there overnight. A lot of things were mixed together completely randomly.”
But things soon became less random. For Christmas, before his seventh birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that contained a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been searching the internet for chemical reactions and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide together can produce enormous amounts of heat. That gave him the idea that he might be able to do some good for the world. “I thought this could be a solution to the energy problem, to an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents started keeping a closer eye on him. As it turns out, Heman, now 15, had to get used to adults watching him. These days, a lot of people are paying a lot of attention to him. Last October, 3M and Discovery Education named Heman, a rising 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, the winner of their Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent several forms of skin cancer. It may be years before such a product comes to market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of every weekday in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, hoping to make his dream come true. When school is in session, he’ll be there less often, but he’ll continue to work hard. “I’m really passionate about skin cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that my bar of soap will one day have a direct impact on someone else’s life. That’s the reason I started this in the first place.”
It is this ambition – not to mention selflessness – that has earned Heman the 2024 TIME Kid of the Year award.
Heman was born in Addis Ababa and immigrated to the United States with his family at age four. Among his earliest memories is seeing laborers working in the scorching sun, most with no protection for their skin. His parents taught him and his sisters – Hasset, now 16, and Liya, now 7 – to cover themselves and explained to them the dangers of spending too much time outdoors without sun protection or appropriate clothing.
“When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it, but when I came to America, I realized what a big problem the sun and ultraviolet radiation are when you’re exposed to it for long periods of time,” Heman says.
It didn’t take long for him to think about how he could help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that is approved to fight one form of skin cancer, among other things, and has shown promise in several others as well. Normally, imiquimod, which can destroy tumors and is usually available in the form of a cream, is prescribed as a first-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made more accessible to people in the earliest stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he figured, might be just the right delivery system for such a life-saving drug, not only because it’s simple, but also because it would be much more affordable than the $40,000 a skin cancer treatment typically costs.
“What is an idea that has international impact, something that everyone can use, regardless of socioeconomic class?” Heman recalls. “Almost everyone uses soap and water to clean, so soap would probably be the best option.”
But it was a long road from idea to application. Putting his idea into practice was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into a regular bar of soap, as the therapeutic effects of imiquimod would simply be washed down the drain with the soap suds. The solution was to mix the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would remain on the skin when the soap was washed off – similar to how moisturizer or fragrances can remain after soap suds are rinsed off.
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However, Heman couldn’t do unlimited brainstorming on his own. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M Challenge and submitted a video explaining his idea. He soon received an invitation to the company’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, to pitch to a panel of judges. He was named the winner that same day. He knew the $25,000 prize would help him fund his research, but he would still need a professional lab in which to do the work. That opportunity came in February, when he attended a Melanoma Research Alliance networking event in Washington, DC. There, he met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
“I remember reading somewhere about a young guy who had an idea for a skin cancer soap,” says Rebecca. “It immediately piqued my interest because I thought how cool that he wanted to share it with the world. And then, by pure coincidence, at this Melanoma Research Alliance meeting, the CEO of the alliance introduced me to Heman. From the first conversation, his passion was obvious. When I found out he lived nearby in Virginia, I told him that if he ever wanted to stop by the lab, he was more than welcome.”
Heman embraced the idea, and Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman, serve as his principal investigator, and invite him to work in the Baltimore lab, where he could commute between lab work and graduate work in Fairfax.
For nearly half a year now, Heman and Rebecca have been doing basic research on mice, injecting the animals with skin cancers and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-enriched soap and await the results. And while they are preparing to test the soap and a control soap against melanoma, Heman knows that “we still have a long way to go” – not just testing the soap, but also patenting it and getting FDA certification, which could take a decade in total.
Heman’s enormous head start is reflected in the fact that when this decade is over, he will only be 25 years old – the age when medical students have not even finished their post-graduate studies. He is using his time well. He is not only working on his idea, but also promoting it. In June, he gave a presentation to 8,000 people at a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists at the Tsongas Center in Boston. “It was nerve-racking,” he says, “but it was fun.”
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Heman also has fun in more conventional ways. He is part of the Woodson High School marching band and plays the flute and trombone. He plays basketball, reads voraciously (especially fantasy, although he has recently The Great Gatsby, He describes the book as “quite an interesting read”) and considers chess to be “something where I can turn off my brain and play”.
He credits his family, especially his parents, for setting the stage for his successes. His mother, Muluemebet, is a teacher, and his father, Wondwossen, is a human resources specialist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Their example of sacrifice in coming to a foreign country to support their children’s education instilled in him a love of learning and a determination to achieve the improbable – or even the seemingly impossible. His parents and Rebecca are not the only adults who accompany him on his long scientific journey. He is also supported by Deborah Isabelle, his mentor at 3M.
“I was really lucky,” says Isabelle. “Last year was my first year as a mentor in the Young Scientist Challenge and I was paired with Heman. He is an incredible, passionate and very inspiring young man.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make mistakes – and Isabelle, for example, is there to catch him when he falls.
“When he was making the soap, at one point things weren’t working the way he expected,” she says. “So I asked him, ‘What didn’t work? What did you do?’ We talked about it and he was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t follow the directions exactly.’ So we talked about it and he was able to figure out some things and say, ‘OK, I learned that from that.'”
With this kind of trial and error, Heman hopes to one day be able to use his health-promoting soap to treat early-stage cancers – even in what is known as stage 0, when it is just a small growth that has not yet significantly affected the surface of the skin – and then in later stages, when it can be used as a complement to other treatments.
Despite all this, Heman remains modest about what he has accomplished in just 15 years. “Anyone could do what I have done,” he says. “I just had an idea. I worked toward that idea and was able to bring it to life.” But he admits he is also worried: Scientific breakthroughs seem to be coming faster and faster – in medicine, engineering, artificial intelligence – and he fears that humans may have reached a saturation point.
“Many people have the attitude that everything has already been done and there’s nothing left for me to do,” he says. “To anyone who thinks like that, I would say we will never run out of ideas in this world. Just keep inventing. Keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and make it a better place.”
—With reporting by Julia Zorthian
