The Gift of Life
Courage & Determination:
Bone Marrow Donors & Recipients
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NJN Public Television is proud to offer The Gift of Life, a heartwarming documentary that explores the crucial need for bone marrow donors. Sara Lee Kessler, NJN Health & Medical Correspondent, is the host and senior producer. The patients featured are among the 3,000 people with life-threatening blood disorders who search an international registry daily for a potential match. They have failed to find one among family members and will die without a transplant. We have often heard their heart-wrenching eleventh-hour appeals for help.

What does it take to give The Gift of Life to a total stranger? This one-hour special examines that issue as NJN television cameras follow a donor into the operating room and on a cross-country journey that results in an emotional reunion between two men who share a common bond that begins at the DNA level. The Gift of Life chronicles more than a dozen stories of courage, altruism and survival. Kessler traveled the country, interviewing donors, recipients and leukemia patients in New York, Maryland, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago and Minneapolis. Highlights include interviews with:

• Anissa Ayala, the young California woman whose parents made history and headlines more than a decade ago when they conceived another baby to try to save Anissa's life.
• The family of Allison Atlas, whose 1990 struggle with leukemia, publicized by actor Dustin Hoffman, brought 60,000 people into the National Marrow Donor Program.
• A heroic New York City firefighter, who thinks of his bone marrow donation as just another rescue mission. He gave a 6-year-old Nevada girl a second chance at life.
• A seven-year-old Minnesota boy whose leukemia has been cured by Debbie the Donor.
• A retired Seattle police detective who is facing death because his unique Cherokee/African-American heritage has made it impossible to find a donor.

On the set of the popular daytime television drama The Young and the Restless, Kessler visits with the show's writers who added a bone marrow storyline to the series after two tragedies struck home. The Gift of Life also features Dr. John A. Hansen, a bone marrow pioneer at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle and the City of Hope Cancer Center in Los Angeles.

The Gift of Life received a Best of the Best Award from the New Jersey Broadcasters Association and will be receiving a Clarion award from Women in Communications in October. The genesis for The Gift of Life is a series of bone marrow reports Kessler produced for NJN News in 1999 and 2000, profiling Kessler's husband, Robert Miller, a New Jersey resident who gave his marrow to a complete stranger. The stranger, Matthew Paul, was a young man from Chicago who, at the time, was dying of leukemia

Kessler's reports, which received four Emmy nominations, raised awareness of the need for bone marrow donors. Following the airing of the initial news segments, the National Marrow Donor Program reported receiving over 1,000 phone calls from people requesting information about how they could become donors.

Janice Selinger, NJN Deputy Executive Director for Production, is executive producer of The Gift of Life. Robert Sands created the original music for the documentary. The program was made possible in part by The Blood Center of New Jersey, PNC Bank and the New Jersey Commission on Cancer Research. Travel was made possible thanks to a trade agreement with American Airlines.