In case anyone is wondering, he won a pitch competition hosted by 3M who sponsored him to do research into adding imiquimod to soap: https://time.com/6996507/heman-bekele/

Unfortunately, probably nothing will come of this because as Times’s own article states, the FDA would take at least a decade before approving it, meaning the only way they’ll be able to rapidly prototype it would be with the full backing of a pharmaceutical company (3M) which means they’ll be selling 40k per unit bars of soap.

ie cough up half a million for skin cancer treatment anyway.

But thanks 3M for pretending to care about cancer after you got sued for exposing the entire US population to PFAS.

Article is frustratingly missing every single interesting detail.

give kids 25000$, steal their ideas, look like you are supporting them. nicely done capitalism

Fucking hell, as if there isn’t enough pressure on children nowadays due to the news, social media, and parents setting unrealistic expectations of careers, life, etc.

Congrats to the kid, it sounds like an amazing achievement - but 15 year olds should be enjoying their youth. Hopefully this kid is, which I imagine is true since he’s in a major magazine and is a little bit richer today.

Here’s a WaPo article (archive link) with more information and Heman Bekele’s original video he submitted to 3M (that explains pretty much everything).

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