(NEW YORK) — A 14-year-old student has created a new kind of soap that he hopes could potentially be used to treat skin cancer someday. Heman Bekele, a high school student in Fairfax, Virginia, says it costs only $8.50 to create a batch of 20 bars of the soap, which he calls Skin Cancer Treating Soap, or SCTS. “He is an incredibly bright, passionate and focused young man,” Deborah Isabelle, Heman’s mentor for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge and a product engineering specialist at 3M, said about him in a statement. According to Isabelle, there are topical creams that treat skin cancer, but they are more expensive than SCTS, and use different ingredients and formulations. According to the young scientist, those images stuck with him, leaving him to wonder how constant exposure to ultraviolet rays from the sun were affecting the people of his homeland.
