The Gift of Life
A Look at the Courage & Determination
Of Bone Marrow Donors & Recipients
Wednesday, November 12, at 9 pm

STATEWIDE - A special rebroadcast of the Emmy award-winning documentary The Gift of Life will be seen on NJN on Wednesday, November 12, at 9 pm. This year, the heartwarming special received an Emmy from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the National Television Academy for Outstanding Health and Science Program. The Gift of Life has been selected to air nationally on other public television stations. Viewers in other parts of the country should check their local listings for air dates and times.

The Gift of Life 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 meeting of 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 a national Clarion award from Women in Communications. In addition, The Museum of Broadcast Communications requested that the program be added to its George Foster Peabody Archives collection in Chicago which features some of television's finest documentaries. 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 and support from American Airlines.