15-year-old Heman Bekele, who was born in Ethiopia, has been named the 2024 TIME’s Kid of the Year for developing a bar soap that treats skin cancer.
“Anybody could do what I did,” Heman told TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger during a visit to his research lab at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.
During his research, Bekele discovered imiquimod, a body cream often prescribed for skin cancer treatment, and moved on to work with salicylic acid, glycolic acid, and tretinoin, eventually developing his skin cancer treating soap (SCTS), which protects the skin by reactivating the skin’s dendritic cells and, in turn, boosts the skin’s immunity.
Just last October, Heman Bekele won a $25,000 grant for his pitch at the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, which is being used to further his education and advance his research on SCTS.
According to Bekele, he has had a passion for science since before he could remember. “I’ve just had such a huge love for just knowing things about this world and being curious and really asking questions,” he said.
Before emigrating to the U.S. at the age of four, Bekele watched people work long hours under the sun in Ethiopia, and it stayed on his mind ever since; this experience, along with his parents’ counsel to avoid staying out in the rain without sunscreen or appropriate clothing, led young Bekele to seek affordable treatment options for those with skin cancer.
“Skin cancer is mostly found in people who live in developing countries,” Bekele said after winning the 3M Young Scientist Challenge.
According to him, he was devastated when he found out that the average price for a skin operation was $40,000, which meant that people had to choose between going for treatment and “putting food on the table for their families.”
Speaking to PBS early this year, Bekele explained that his “main goal was not only to fight against skin cancer but to find a more affordable and accessible approach to it,” and in order to achieve that, he had to “find a completely different way toward the traditional form of treating skin cancer, which really is surgery or radiation therapy.” For him, that eventually became a “topical application.”
Still a teenager at High School in Fairfax County, Va., Bekele says, “there’s still a long way to go,” as he plans on increasing SCTS’s standard for it to be market viable by 2028.
The other five TIME’s 2024 honorees include:
- 13-year-old Madhvi Chittoor from Colorado, who successfully campaigned for a new state law against pollution;
- 13-year-old Shanya Gill from California, who is developing a new kind of fire detector;
- 15-year-old Dom Pecora from Pennsylvania, who is touching his community with his bike-repair business;
- 15-year-old Jordan Sucato from Arizona, who has been holding campaigns to protect pets from her region’s extreme heat;
and 11-year-old Keivonn Woodard from Maryland, who became the first Black Deaf actor to be nominated for an Emmy award.
Together, these kids are proof that no one is too small to create positive and transformative change in the world
