In a video for a nationwide science competition, Heman Bekele spelled out his mission in a single sentence.
“Curing cancer, one bar of soap at a time.”
In the two-minute video, Heman, a student at Fairfax County’s Frost Middle School, pitched his idea for a soap that could help fight skin cancer at a cost of less than $10 per bar. The soap, Heman explained, would be made with compounds that could reactivate the cells that guard human skin, enabling them to fight cancer cells. In April, Heman submitted the video to the 3M Young Scientist Challenge, an annual competition that invites students in grades five through eight to “change their world for the better with a single innovative idea.”
