US student, 14, wins award for developing soap to treat skin cancer

3 years ago by MicroWave to c/upliftingnews

Heman Bekele was inspired by Ethiopian workers laboring under the sun, and wanted to help ‘as many people as possible’

A middle-school teen has been named “America’s top young scientist” after developing a bar of soap that could be useful in the treatment of melanoma, a skin cancer that is diagnosed in about 100,000 people in the US each year and kills approximately 8,000.

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hark 49 points 3 years ago

Does it actually work?

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MicroWave 105 points 3 years ago
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jasory 72 points 3 years ago

Whenever you read "X-year old does something", it's usually already been done or a slight modification of something already been done.

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RedditWanderer 44 points 3 years ago

Don't underestimate our ability to miss the obvious. You're talking about the race that over 3000 or so years, forgot scurvy was cured by vitamin C over 10 times.

They also used to shape steel wire by pulling it really hard through a kinda steel funnel. This works because the tensile strength of steel is much higher than its yield strength, so you can pull on it with more force than it takes to shape it, without it snapping.

Back in the day, we figured out corrosion helped make the steel slippery when it went through the shaping tool. We though it was because some dudes pissed on the steel, so for a while after people pissed on their steel. Until people started figuring out beer worked just as well, and then half beer half water.

Until they finally realized water worked just as well to create corrosion. It took a couple hundred years.

Sometimes it just takes someone to think about it and do it. At 14 that's incredible, kids aren't that selfless at that age.

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snooggums 26 points 3 years ago

Whenever you read “person does something”, it’s usually already been done or a slight modification of something already been done.

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rustydrd 11 points 3 years ago

Even if the active ingredients are already known, developing a new mode of application for an existing drug is an enormous accomplishment for a student his age. Plus, the alternative (minors doing experiments with unapproved drugs) is likely illegal, so there's only so much they could do.

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grabyourmotherskeys 7 points 3 years ago

When I was 14, I was not helping to cure cancer. My science fair project was about salt raising the boiling point of water. :) I'll give him props but you're right.

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Malfeasant 1 point 3 years ago

Whenever anyone does anything, that's usually the case...

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cricket97 -1 points 3 years ago path: 0 4908074 4908228 4909320 4918923, hotness: undefined, score: -1, children: 0
ArtificialLink -9 points 3 years ago

Must be fun to be so cynical all the time. Otherwise idk why you would do it? Like yeah fuck them kids. Better to not encourage them at all and say "you stupid idiot someone basically already did this what you're doing is pointless, dumbass"

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_number8_ 35 points 3 years ago

He has a five-year plan

this is one of those business buzzwords that makes my skin crawl

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WoahWoah 10 points 3 years ago

Yes, a timeline and plan for reaching a goal. So buzzy.

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ThePantser 9 points 3 years ago

There's a cream for that

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synceDD -6 points 3 years ago

Crawling over words lmaooo soy

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