Heman Bekele, 14, won the title of America’s Top Young Scientist.
Heman Bekele, a 14-year-old school student, has achieved the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist” by creating an innovative soap specifically formulated to address skin cancer.
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Heman Bekele is a ninth-grade student at WT Woodson High School in Annandale, Virginia. He has achieved the title of “America’s Top Young Scientist” by creating an innovative soap specifically formulated to address skin cancer.
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According to The New York Times, Heman spent the last four months competing against nine other finalists, and he developed a compound-based bar of soap designed to treat melanoma. The bar of soap costs about less than $10 to make.
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Heman hopes to refine his innovation and create a non-profit organisation to distribute the soap to communities in need over the next five years, according to 3M and Discovery Education.
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According to The New York Times, Heman’s idea for the competition came from the early years of his life in Ethiopia. “There, I always saw people who were constantly working under the hot sun,” Heman said.
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The soap could help fight skin cancer at a cost of less than $10 per bar. The soap would be made with compounds that could reactivate the cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells.
