Heman Bekele concocted the most dangerous of what he called his “potions” when he was just over 7 years old. By then he had been conducting his scientific experiments for about three years, mixing up whatever he could get his hands on at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into something.
“It was just dish soap, laundry detergent, and common household chemicals,” she says today of the ingredients she used. “I would hide them under the bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of random mixing.”
But things soon became less random. For Christmas, before his seventh birthday, Heman received a chemistry set that included a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had started looking up chemical reactions online and discovered that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can produce prodigious amounts of heat together. This made him think that maybe he could do some good in the world. “I thought this could be a solution to energyto make an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
After that, his parents kept a closer eye on him. As it turns out, having adults watching his work is something Heman, now 15, would have to get used to. These days, a lot of people are paying close attention. Last October, the 3M company and Discovery Education selected Heman, a 10th-grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of the Young Scientist Challenge. His prize: $25,000. His accomplishment: inventing a soap that could one day cure and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer. It could be years before such a product hits the market, but this summer Heman is already spending part of each weekday working 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 keep busy. “I’m really passionate about skin cancer research,” she says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my bar of soap will be able to directly impact someone else’s life. That’s why I started this in the first place.”
It is this ambition, not to mention altruism, that earned Heman the title of TIME magazine’s 2024 Boy of the Year.
Born in Addis Ababa before immigrating to the United States with his family at age 4, Heman recalls that some of his earliest memories were of seeing workers working in the scorching sunusually without any skin protection. His parents taught him and his sisters, Hasset, now 16, and Liya, now 7, to cover up, and explained 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 that the sun and ultraviolet radiation are a big problem when you’re exposed to them for a long time,” Heman says.
It didn’t take long for him to start thinking about how he could help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, is approved to fight a form of skin cancer and has shown promise against many others. Imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and usually comes in a cream form, is typically prescribed as a first-line drug as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered whether it could be made more readily available to people in the early stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he figured, might be the right delivery system for such a life-saving drug, not only because it’s simple but because it would be much more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs to treat skin cancer.
“What is an idea that has an international impact, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Heman recalls thinking. “Most people use soap and water to clean. So soap would probably be the best choice.”
But there was still a long way to go between inspiration and application. Putting his idea into practice was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into a regular bar of soap, since any therapeutic power imiquimod might have conferred would simply be washed down the drain with the suds. The answer was to combine the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would remain on the skin after the soap was washed off, much like a moisturizer or fragrance might remain after the suds are rinsed away.
Learn more: What is the best skin care routine?
But Heman could only brainstorm so much on his own. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M challenge and submitted a video explaining his idea. Shortly thereafter, he received an invitation to the company’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, to pitch to a panel of judges. Before the day was out, he had been named the winner. The $25,000 prize, he knew, would go a long way toward affording 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 networking event hosted by Alliance for Melanoma Researchin Washington, D.C. There, he met Vito Rebeccamolecular biologist and associate professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
“I remember reading somewhere about this kid who had this idea for a skin cancer soap,” Rebecca says. “It piqued my interest right away, because I thought, How cool, he wants to make this accessible to the world. And then, in a total serendipity, 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 really close by in Virginia, I said if he ever wanted to stop by the lab, he’d be more than welcome to come.”
Heman accepted the idea and Rebecca agreed to sponsor him, becoming his principal investigator and inviting him to work at the Baltimore lab, alternating classroom work with school commitments in Fairfax.
For nearly six months, Heman and Rebecca have been doing basic research in mice, injecting the animals with skin cancer strains and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-infused soap to see what the results are. And while they’re preparing to test it and control it against melanoma, Heman knows “there’s a long way to go”—not just testing the soap, but also patenting it and getting it FDA-approved, which could take a decade in total.
It’s a measure of Heman’s enormous head start that when that decade is up, he’ll still be just 25, the age when medical students haven’t completed their post-graduate training. He’s making good use of that time. In addition to working on his idea, he’s promoting it. In June, he gave a presentation to 8,000 people at the Tsongas Center in Boston, during a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists. “It was nerve-wracking,” he says, “but it was fun.”
Learn more: Scientists Are Discovering How Toxic Your Stuff Is
Heman also entertains himself in more conventional ways. He is a member of the Woodson High School marching band, playing both flute and trombone. He plays basketball, reads voraciously (especially fantasy, although he recently reread The Great Gatsby, which he describes as “quite an interesting read”), and considers chess “a kind of thing where I turn my brain off and play.”
He credits his family, especially his parents, with laying the groundwork for his success. His mother, Muluemebet, is a teacher; his father, Wondwossen, is a human resources specialist for the United States Agency for International Development. Their example of sacrifice, coming to an unfamiliar country to educate their children, has instilled in him a love of learning and a commitment to pursuing the unlikely, or even the seemingly impossible. And his parents and Rebecca aren’t the only adults who guide him on his long scientific journey. He also has support from Deborah Isabelle, his mentor from 3M.
“I was really lucky,” Isabelle says. “Last year was my first year as a mentor for the Young Scientist Challenge, and I was matched with Heman. He’s an incredible guy, passionate and very inspiring.”
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make mistakes, and Isabelle, for example, has always been there to catch him when he falls.
“At one point, when he was making soap, things didn’t work out the way he expected,” she says. “So I asked him, ‘What went wrong? What did you do?’ And we talked about it, and he said, ‘Wow, I didn’t follow the instructions exactly.’ And so we talked about it, and he was able to move forward and figure some things out, and say, ‘OK, here’s what I learned from this.'”
This kind of trial and error, Heman hopes, will lead to the day when his healthy soap can finally be put to early use. tumors—including so-called stage 0 cancer, when there is only a small growth that hasn’t yet had a major effect on the skin’s surface—and then into later stages, when it might be an adjunct to other treatments.
Despite all this, Heman remains humble about what he’s accomplished in just 15 years. “Anyone could do what I’ve done,” he says. “I just had an idea. I worked for that idea and I was able to bring it to life.” But he also confesses to being concerned: Scientific breakthroughs seem to be coming faster and faster, in medicine, in engineering, in artificial intelligence, and he worries that people may have reached some sort of saturation point.
“A lot of people have this mindset that everything’s been done, there’s nothing more I can do,” he says. “To anyone who has that thought, [I’d say] We will never run out of ideas in this world. Keep inventing. Keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and keep making it a better place.”
—With the collaboration of Julia Zorthian