US student, 14, wins award for developing soap to treat skin cancer

By Edward Helmore, The Guardian

Heman Bekele was inspired by Ethiopian workers laboring under the sun, and wanted to help ‘as many people as possible’

A middle-school teen has been named “America’s top young scientist” after developing a bar of soap that could be useful in the treatment of melanoma, a skin cancer that is diagnosed in about 100,000 people in the US each year and kills approximately 8,000.

Heman Bekele, a 14-year-old ninth grader from Annandale, Virginia, won the award after beating out nine other finalists.

[…]

Bekele’s idea came from living in Ethiopia to the age of four where, he told the Washington Post, he had seen people constantly working under the hot sun: “I wanted to make my idea something that not only was great in terms of science but also could be accessible to as many people as possible.”

His mentor at 3M, Deborah Isabelle, described the teen to the outlet as “focused on making the world a better place for people he hasn’t necessarily even met yet”.

Read the teen’s innovative pitch in the full article.

A recent study has found that Black men face an increased risk of dying of melanoma.

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