TIME names Woodson student and scientist ‘kid of the year’

TIME magazine has named Woodson High School student Heman Bekele the 2024 “Kid of the Year.”

Bekele was just 14 when he created a special, affordable soap that can be used to treat skin cancer. That invention netted him the title “America’s Top Young Scientist” and a $23,00 prize in the 3M Young Scientist Challenge in 2023.

This summer, Heman has been working in a lab at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore to refine the cancer-treating soap.  

Before his family emigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopa, Heman had early memories of people working in the hot sun without sunscreen or protective clothing. “When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it,” he told TIME, “but when I came to America, I realized what a big problem the sun and ultraviolet radiation is when you’re exposed to it for a long time.”

After he read about the drug imiquimod, which is used in a cream to attack skin cancer tumors and costs about $40,000, he began exploring the idea of using it in a soap that anyone could use, regardless of socioeconomic class.

The tricky part is preventing the drug from simply washing down the drain with the suds. So he came up with the idea of combining the soap with a lipid-based nanoparticle that would linger on the skin when the soap was washed away, TIME explains.

To implement that idea, he needed to work at a professional lab. He met Vito Rebecca, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore at a networking event in February, the article reports. Rebecca agreed to sponsor Heman and act as his principal investigator.  

For the past few months, Heman and Rebecca have been running basic research on mice, injecting the animals with strains of skin cancer and preparing to apply the lipid-bound, imiquimod-infused soap. According to TIME, there’s still a long way to go to get the treatment patented and approved for use on humans.

Meanwhile, Heman, now 15, is still a student at Woodson, where he plays flute and trombone in the marching band. In his free time, he likes to read and play basketball and chess.

“Anybody could do what I did,” he told TIME “I just came up with an idea. I worked towards that idea, and I was able to bring it to life.”