Heman Bekele Is TIME’s Kid of the Year 2024: TIME Kid of the Year List

Heman Bekele brewed what he calls the most dangerous “potions” when he was just over 7 years old. He had already been conducting his own scientific experiments for about three years, mixing whatever he could get at home and waiting to see if the resulting goo would turn into anything.

“They were just laundry detergent, laundry detergent, and regular household chemicals,” he says today of the ingredients he would use. “I would hide them under the bed and see what would happen if I left them overnight. There was a lot of completely random mixing.”

But soon things became less random. For Christmas, before his 7th birthday, Heman received a chemistry kit that came with a sample of sodium hydroxide. At that time, he was researching chemical reactions online and learned that aluminum and sodium hydroxide can together produce prodigious amounts of heat. It made him think that maybe he could do some good in the world. “I thought this could be a solution for energy, to make an unlimited supply,” he says. “But I almost started a fire.”

After that, his parents kept an eye on him. It turns out that having adults watch what he does is something that Heman, now 15, would have to get used to. Nowadays, many people are paying a lot of attention to him. Last October, 3M and Discovery Education selected Heman, a rising 10th grader at Woodson High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, as the winner of the Young Scientist Challenge. Your prize: $25,000. His achievement: inventing a soap that could one day treat and even prevent various forms of skin cancer. It could be years before such a product hits the market, but this summer 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 make his dream come true. Once school is in session, he will be there less often but will continue to work. “I’m really passionate about skin cancer research,” he says, “whether it’s my own research or what’s happening on the ground. It’s absolutely incredible to think that one day my soap could make a direct impact on someone else’s life. That’s the reason I started all this in the first place.”

It’s this ambition – not to mention this selflessness – that has earned Heman recognition as TIME’s 2024 Boy of the Year.

Born in Addis Ababa before emigrating to the US with his family when he was 4 years old, Heman recalls that some of his earliest memories were of seeing workers working under the scorching sun, often without skin protection. His parents taught him and his sisters – Hasset, now 16, and Liya, now 7 – to cover up and explained the dangers of spending too much time outdoors without sunscreen or proper clothing.

“When I was younger, I didn’t think about it much, but when I came to America, I realized that the sun and ultraviolet radiation are a big problem when you’re exposed to them for a long time,” says Heman.

It didn’t take long for him to start thinking about how he could help. A few years ago, he read about imiquimod, a drug that, among other uses, was approved to fight one type of skin cancer and has shown promise against several others. Typically, imiquimod, which can help destroy tumors and often comes in cream form, is prescribed as a first-line medication as part of a broader cancer treatment plan, but Heman wondered if it could be made more easily available to people. people in the early stages of the disease. A bar of soap, he calculated, might just be the delivery system for a life-saving drug, not just because it was simple, but because it would be much more affordable than the $40,000 it typically costs to treat breast cancer. skin.

“What is an idea with international impact, something that everyone can use, [regardless of] socioeconomic class?” Heman remembers thinking. “Almost everyone uses soap and water to clean. So soap would probably be the best option.”

However, there was a long way to go between inspiration and application. Executing his idea was more complicated than simply mixing the drug into an ordinary bar of soap, as any therapeutic power the imiquimod might impart would simply be flushed down the drain with the suds. The answer was to combine the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would remain on the skin when the soap was removed—in the same way that moisturizer or fragrance might remain after the foam is rinsed away.

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However, there was only so much brainstorming Heman could do alone. Then, in 2023, he came across the 3M challenge and sent a video explaining his idea. Soon, he received an invitation to the company’s headquarters in St. Paul, Minnesota, to give a presentation in front of a panel of judges. Before that day was over, he was named the winner. The $25,000 prize, he knew, would greatly help him continue his research, but he would still need a professional laboratory to conduct the work. This opportunity arose in February, when he participated in a networking event organized by Melanoma Research Alliancein Washington, D.C. There, he met Vito Rebecamolecular biologist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

“I remember reading somewhere about a boy who had the idea for a skin cancer soap,” says Rebecca. “That immediately piqued my interest because I thought, how cool is that he wants to make this accessible to the entire world. And then, by chance, at this Melanoma Research Alliance meeting, the CEO of the alliance introduced me to Heman. From the first conversation, his passion was evident. When I discovered that he lived very close by in Virginia, she told him that if he ever wanted to stop by the lab, he was more than welcome.

Heman accepted this idea, and Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman, acting as his principal investigator and inviting him to work in the Baltimore laboratory, alternating between bench and school work in Fairfax.

For almost half a year, Heman and Rebecca have been carrying out basic research on mice, injecting the animals with skin cancer strains and preparing to apply the imiquimod-infused, lipid-linked soap and see what the results are. And although they are preparing to test it and control it against melanoma, Heman knows that “there is still a long way to go” – not just testing the soap, but also patenting it and obtaining FDA certification, which it could take a decade in total.

It is a measure of Heman’s enormous head start that when that decade passes, he will still be just 25 years old – the age at which medical students have not even completed their postgraduate education. He is making good use of this time. In addition to working on his idea, he is promoting it. In June, he gave a presentation to 8,000 people at Boston’s Tsongas Center during a meeting of the National Academy of Future Physicians and Medical Scientists. “That was nerve-wracking,” he says, “but it was fun.”

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Heman also has fun in more conventional ways. He is a member of the Woodson High School marching band on both flute and trombone. He plays basketball, reads voraciously (especially fantasy, although he has recently reread The Great Gatsby, which he describes as “a very good read”) and considers chess “the kind of thing that makes you turn off your brain and play”.

He credits his family, especially his parents, for laying the groundwork for his achievements. His mother, Muluemebet, is a teacher; His father, Wondwossen, is a human resources specialist at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The example of his sacrifice, coming to an unknown country to educate his children, imbued him with a love of learning and a commitment to pursue the improbable—or even the seemingly impossible. His parents and Rebecca are also not the only adults who accompany him on his long scientific journey. He is also assisted by Deborah Isabelle, his mentor from 3M.

“I was very lucky,” says Isabelle. “Last year was my first year participating as a mentor in the Young Scientist Challenge, and I was paired with Heman. He is an incredible young man, passionate and very inspiring.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t make mistakes – and Isabelle, for one, is there to catch him when he falls.

“At one point when he was making the soap, things didn’t work out as he expected,” she says. “So I asked him: what didn’t work? What did you do? And we talked about it, and he said, ‘Wow, I didn’t exactly follow the instructions.’ And then we had a conversation about it, and he was able to reach out and figure out some things and say, ‘OK, this is what I learned from this.'”

This kind of trial and error, Heman hopes, will lead to the day when his health-boosting soap can finally be used on early-stage cancers — including so-called stage 0 cancer, when there is only a small growth that has not yet existed. a lot of effect on the surface of the skin – and then in later stages, when it would be a complement to other treatments.

Despite all this, Heman remains humble about what he has achieved in just 15 years. “Anyone could do what I did,” he says. “I just had an idea. I worked on this idea and managed to bring it to life.” But he confesses that he also worries: scientific discoveries seem to be happening faster and faster – in medicine, in engineering, in artificial intelligence – and he worries that people may have reached a kind of saturation point.

“A lot of people have this mentality that everything has already been done, there’s nothing left for me to do,” he says. “For anyone who has this thought, [I’d say] we will never run out of ideas in this world. Keep inventing. Keep thinking of new ways to improve our world and make it a better place.”

—With reporting by Julia Zorthian