Amid all this foolishness going on, this is the kind of news we love to see…
A young, gifted, and Black teen who invented soap that may one day be used to treat cancer has been named TIME Magazine’s 2024 Kid of the Year and you’ve GOT to get details on him.
Meet Heman Bekele.
According to TIME, Heman wasn’t even seven years old when he became interested in chemistry. At an age when most kids are begging their parents for new toys and entertaining themselves by staring at screens (no judgment there, BTW, we all did it), Heman was sneaking around with household products he mixed together and called “potions” before his parents got him his very first chemistry set just before he turned seven.
From Time:
“They were just dish soap, laundry detergent, and common household chemicals,” he says today of the ingredients he’d use. “I would hide them under my bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of mixing together completely at random.”
But soon, things got less random. For Christmas before his 7th birthday, Heman was given a chemistry set that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. By then, he had been looking up chemical reactions online and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together produce prodigious amounts of heat. That got him thinking that perhaps he could do the world some good. “I thought that this could be a solution to energy, to making an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”
He didn’t start a fire though—unless you count the fire of inspiration still burning bright in him years later. At 14, Heman, who was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and raised in Fairfax, Virginia, where he has lived since he was four, won the grand prize in this year’s 3M Young Scientist’s Challenge, a competition that encourages young innovators to think of unique ways to solve everyday problems.
He earned his $25,000 prize by ” inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent multiple forms of skin cancer,” according to TIME, which also noted that Heman “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.”
Heman is now a 10th grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, but he says he can still remember seeing laborers in Addis Ababa working under the hot sun with nothing protecting their skin. Those memories inspired the teen to approach his 3M challenge with a project that will not only aid people in their everyday lives (we all need soap, after all), but also treat deadly skin diseases that could upend a person’s life.
“I’m really passionate about skin-cancer research, whether it’s my own research or what’s happening in the field,” he 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. That’s the reason I started this all in the first place.”
During an interview with NPR, Heman discussed his process of developing his soap and how his project was impacted once he became a finalist in the 3M competition.
“A lot of my research and development started in my family’s kitchen and in my basement,” he explained. “Of course, I wasn’t doing any serious nanoparticle generation or anything like that, I was just going through the saponification [soap-making] process. All it really requires is an emulsifier, some bases and a couple of chemicals. So I was able to do that all relatively safely and efficiently just from my house.
“But as I became a finalist, I realized that I did need to do a little bit more outside of just my house. So I reached out to people at [University of Virginia] and people at Georgetown, and I got a lot of assistance. The number one person [who helped me] would be Deborah Isabelle, my 3M designated mentor. She helped organize and structure my thoughts and she has so much experience in the field of R&D. I definitely couldn’t have couldn’t have done this all by myself.”
Yeeeeeah, you know—no big deal. Just a little emulsifier. He wasn’t even doing—*checks notes*—”serious nanoparticle generation” at the time. (Seriously, at 14, I was watching Xmen and blowing into SEGA cartridges.)
Isabelle described Heman as “kind, intelligent, focused, inspiring and energetic,” and said he will “continue to inspire other young people to realize that science can make a positive difference.”
He might be inspiring some of us older folks too.
Congratulations, Heman Bekele. May your light continue to shine!
