A Teenager Wins US Young Scientist Award as He Invents Soap that Cures Cancer
A 14-year-old school teen, Heman Bekele, ninth grade from Annandale, Virginia has been crowned “America’s top young scientist” after beating out nine other contestants on discovering a bar of soap that can cure a skin cancer ‘melanoma’.
About 100,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with Melanoma, the most dangerous type of skin cancer yearly which has killed a lot of people.
Bekele won $25,000 in 3M’s 2023 Young Scientist Challenge, for inventing a bar of soap that could be used to treat skin cancer.
Bekele disclosed that he wished to move his soap to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process so that the product can make its way into the market at an affordable price for the treatment of diseases that kill nearly 8,000 Americans annually.
Heman Bekele said: “Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time. I have always been interested in biology and technology, and this challenge gave me the perfect platform to showcase my ideas.”
He disclosed that he has ambitions to expand his work in the nonprofit space to help as many people as possible.
The teenager also said he looks forward to moving from just focusing on cancer to topics like DNA and electrical engineering.
“I’m looking for new fields to start learning more about because I’ve almost checked off oncology on my list,” he said.
Revealing his idea, the soap was made from compounds that could reactivate dendritic cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells. A Teenager Wins US Young Scientist Award as He Invents Soap for Curing Cancer