- [Narrator] This program was made possible by Earl J. Luttner and Family, and is dedicated to Eli Hoch, the donor who saved Earl's life.

And heroic donors everywhere.

Additional major funding was generously provided by Doug Smith.

James C. and Audrey S. Foster.

Julia W. Parker.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America's Corporate Responsibility Team.

(gentle music) - I'm scared.

It's not easy to hear from a doctor that you're going to die of a disease unless you find a donor, and you test thousands of people and you search registries of thousands of people, and you can't find anybody that matches you.

- Jay Feinberg, he was famous.

He was the poster boy for bone marrow.

(gentle music continues) - This is Jay.

Jay is 23 years old and was diagnosed with leukemia last year.

After testing 11,000 strangers to find a suitable donor, Jay is still searching for the bone marrow match that could save his life.

- The clock was ticking, and the sooner that I could find that donor, the greater the chance that I would survive.

And unfortunately, if I didn't find a match, I wouldn't make it.

(gentle music) - We won't be defeated, I won't relent, I'm a relentless mother.

It's going to happen, and we're not about to let him die.

(uplifting music) - If there wasn't a donor in the registry, we were going to go out and recruit donors into the registry through the blood test that we could do at the time.

We organized our very first drive.

The line was out the door, down the sidewalk, into the street, and the police were there doing crowd control.

All this for somebody these people didn't know, a complete stranger.

Yes, it's God's work, everybody coming together.

The donors, the transplant physicians, the nurses, the people at the registry, the people at the donor center, the people at the collection center, the patients' families.

(uplifting music continues) This wasn't just a campaign to save one life, but rather a mission to save many.

That it only takes one person to save a life, and it could be anybody out there.

- I was just so overwhelmed and inspired by over 10,000 people that joined the registry.

And I joined myself, I would do it a million times over.

(uplifting music continues) - The absolute miracle of finding a match, it's way more than one in a million.

- The statistics are horrible for people of color.

So if you are Black or multiracial, you have a 25% chance of getting a match.

That's horrible.

- There are individuals who have a hundred in a million or a thousand in a million donors out there, but there are some individuals who have none.

- Without donors caring enough for people unrelated to them, people unknown to them, strangers, a lot of folks wouldn't be alive today.

And that's the value of Gift of Life in this world.

- What better gift can anybody have than a life?

Jay has given that life to thousands of people.

(audience applauding) - What Jay Feinberg did, went to tell these kind of stories in life, it's incredible how many lives he saved.

- When you can be that inspiration, when you can be that educator, when you can be the person who can talk thousands and thousands of people into participating.

- Thousands and thousands of people tested.

50,000 people had been tested for him.

He had been told that it was going to be impossible for him to find a match.

(gentle music) (rhythmic music) - I was like any other kid who was fresh out of college, you know, feeling indestructible, like you could take on the world and nothing would stop you.

Right around the time that I was getting ready to apply for law school, I got an offer from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, when I was in Florida and started to have some abdominal pain.

(rhythmic music continues) And when I woke up, I could barely walk, and just had tremendous bone and joint pain.

My parents took me back to Northern New Jersey where I was subsequently diagnosed with leukemia.

(rhythmic music continues) The doctor shared what the natural course of the disease was.

In three years, I might not be here anymore.

But in the next breath, the doctor shared that there was a way to treat it through a bone marrow transplant.

There was silence in the room, but the first person to talk was my mother and she said, "Okay, well, what do we have to do?"

The next thing that he shared was really more of a shock.

He didn't feel that I would ever find a match and suggested that I go home and prepare my bucket list and start doing the things that I wanted to do in life while I had the chance.

And when I asked why he didn't think I would find a match, he shared something that totally blew me away that I just was not expecting.

He shared that I wouldn't find a match because I was Jewish.

(rhythmic music) I had no idea at that time why on earth my ethnic background would play a role in my finding a match and having a transplant.

Until he shared that tissue type is inherited, like the color of your eyes or hair, and your best chance of finding a genetic match is with someone who shares the same ethnicity.

And unfortunately at the time, in the registry, there were very, very few Jewish people.

When you're looking for a donor and you can't find that donor in your family, and you have to rely on an unrelated person, those people are located in a database of volunteer unrelated donors.

Those people are available to potentially save a patient's life if they're called as a match one day by the transplant center.

(gentle music) People would join a registry out of a sense of altruism.

They want to help save the life of somebody who needs them.

The registry was very small to begin with at that time, this was all very, very new.

But the number of Jewish people in the registry was almost nonexistent.

So it was really like looking for a needle in a haystack.

(ominous music) The reason why there were so few Jewish people was because of the Holocaust.

Six million Jewish people died during World War II.

It severed bloodlines.

(ominous music continues) There weren't descendants that would come and be available to join the registry.

That was a big challenge.

So you can imagine sitting in that room, my mother hears the news.

So I think like any Jewish mother, or any mother for that matter, she wasn't going to take no for an answer.

(ominous music continues) And Arlene Feinberg went home that night knowing that she wasn't going to let her son die, that she was going to be proactive and do something about it, and that's exactly what she did.

(gentle piano music) The very next day, we reached out to our local federation who organized our very first drive.

We thought a couple of people would be trickling in a little at a time to get tested.

And when we arrived, the line was down the sidewalk, into the street, and the police were there doing crowd control.

Just remarkable.

My mother was the front person interacting with everybody in the community and all of the communities where we ran donor drives.

My father being a CPA, handling contributions as they came in.

He was very much the organizer on the back end.

Always a very quiet, reserved guy.

He used to go out to donor drives too.

- All these resources were being put into the Gift of Life, which was Friends of Jay at the time, bone marrow drives, and getting donors.

They were always looking for money.

You had to pay for all of this, this money wasn't coming out of the sky.

- [Jay] And maybe Mom and Dad can give us some insight on what the students have done here today and how much they've raised so far.

- Jack.

- I understand that they've raised, or have commitments for about $7,500 as of yesterday.

- Mom?

- Well, you're hoping to reach the $10,000, that would be unbelievable.

- Jack and Arlene Feinberg didn't have the kind of money that could support this, so it was tremendously stressful.

(gentle piano music) 1991, Allison Atlas, who was a young woman in this area, was diagnosed with leukemia and started a search for a bone marrow donor.

She happened to be my husband's cousin.

- And we were in a youth group called USY Together, and she was the first person to take things into her own hands and hold community drives for what was then a blood draw.

- And when Jay was diagnosed and realized that he was in the same boat, they connected with each other.

- Allison Atlas was truly a trailblazer and it's because of her inspiration that I'm here today.

- [Rochelle] Allison became sicker and sicker and was at the point where she needed a transplant if there was any hope.

- Why is Dustin Hoffman on a talk show?

You'll pan right now, Anthony.

Meet Allison Atlas.

Miss Atlas is 20 years old, she's from Bethesda, Maryland.

The doctors said you had three to six months to find a bone marrow donor.

And this is where the drama begins.

- The physicians worked closely with her family and they decided they were going to go with the closest thing they had, which was her mother.

She was not by any means a perfect match, she was a half match.

And at the time, the technology wasn't there so that they could do anything about that.

She had the donation, she spent a year in Seattle in the hospital, and then she tragically passed away.

(downbeat music) - Unfortunately, Allison died.

Allison perished because there weren't enough people to pull from.

(downbeat music continues) - It wasn't too long after I got started with the Feinbergs that Arlene and I realized that we just, we couldn't just focus on Jay because now we had all this data and it could not go to waste.

And there were other people in this community, in this world, that we could help, so that became a big focus.

I spent a lot of time perusing the results of all the people that had been tested.

There were so many that just really, really wanted to donate.

They wanted to be the person that saved Jay and then ultimately somebody else.

(gentle piano music) - Back in the early '90s, when we started running these drives, we didn't have social media.

Our version was putting flyers on light posts, in storefronts.

Typical flyer was me sitting on the couch in our living room with my niece in my lap.

So at any given day, you'd have a dozen volunteers photocopying flyers, running them out to synagogues, sending them to wherever those drives were happening throughout the country.

We started receiving calls from Canada, from Israel, from Australia, from the U.K.

Throughout the country we did some massive donor recruitment drives.

Photocopying consent forms and health questionnaires and flyers and organizing the phlebotomists.

When you're doing a drive with a cheek swab, it's pretty easy.

With phlebotomists, where you have to draw blood, you have to ensure that the phlebotomists show up.

Our biggest drive was 5,000 people in one day, in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn.

(voices talking amongst each other) (rhythmic music) Growing up, there were two things that absolutely petrified me.

Blood and public speaking.

And actually those are the two things that I had to do after I was diagnosed.

We've done testing all over the world, and I'd say that Toronto has probably come out more than any place we've ever tested.

There is no cure for this disease and there's no way to put it in remission other than a bone marrow transplant.

But I have been told that my disease is accelerating.

We keep a positive attitude every day.

I have very good caring parents and a network of volunteers all over the world that keep a smile on my face.

(upbeat music) Very compelling human interest story, right?

People are motivated by people.

So if you can put a name and a face to the drive, share the story, then they're much more willing to come out.

- [Reporter 1] Time is running out for 24-year-old Jay Feinberg.

He's one of 9,000 men, women, and children fighting for life.

The technology is available to save him.

The problem is finding a marrow donor who has the exact match.

- [Reporter 2] Nearly 40,000 would-be donors have been tested so far, but the search has come up empty-handed.

- For the viewers, it was very much hearing this for the first time.

Again, it was very, very new.

People had heard about leukemia and blood cancer, but from the treatment side of things, what people typically heard about was chemotherapy.

But with a bone marrow transplant, with a donor being able to give his or her healthy cells to a patient, that offers a cure.

That's something where the patient is going to live cancer-free for the rest of their lives.

Be able to be with their families and their loved ones.

- I must bless you to have healthy news about all your family.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Next time you'll bring me the healthy person.

- Yes.

(rhythmic piano music) - Jay had a chronic myeloid leukemia, which when it was diagnosed was an absolutely incurable disease, except with marrow transplantation.

Now, if you had an identical twin or a matched sibling, we were doing pretty well with transplants by the 90s.

We were getting cure rates that were in the 75% range.

If you waited until they got to the accelerated phase, our cure rates went down to like 40%.

And if we waited till they were really in crisis, then it got down into the teens, 15, 20% cure rate.

But that's if you had a matched sibling.

If you didn't have a matched sibling, then we had to think about an unrelated transplant.

- [Narrator] Finding a matching bone marrow donor was Jay Feinberg's only hope for survival.

But what exactly happens once a donor is found?

A bone marrow transplant is a medical breakthrough that replaces diseased or damaged bone marrow with healthy stem cells.

It's used to treat leukemia, lymphoma, and other life-threatening blood disorders.

Once a matching stem cell donor is found, patients undergo chemotherapy or radiation to destroy unhealthy bone marrow, making room for new cells to take hold.

This approach traces its roots to the groundbreaking research of Dr.

Don Thomas and others, who studied the effects of radiation exposure on victims of the atomic bomb.

(explosion rumbling) Their discoveries led to the realization that high-dose radiation could wipe out diseased marrow, paving the way for healthy stem cells to rebuild the blood supply.

Then comes the transplant.

Stem cells are infused into the patient's bloodstream through an IV, like a blood transfusion.

Over the next two to four weeks, these cells migrate to the bone marrow where they begin the crucial work of producing new healthy blood cells.

Like a new engine for blood, this new system generates the red and white blood cells and platelets the body needs to function and heal.

The patient is monitored for complications, including infection, but when successful, bone marrow transplants give patients a second chance at life.

- This is all from my father's side of the family.

(rhythmic music) For me, it was very much a needle in the haystack.

For any patient, it depends upon how common or uncommon their tissue type is.

My type was particularly uncommon because of a particular antigen that I inherited on my father's side of the family.

My father's family was originally, generations before, from Belarus.

(uplifting music) - [Reporter 3] With the help of his parents, Jay launched an extraordinary worldwide quest to save his own life.

Blood drives were held on five continents.

Jay developed an extensive database tracing his family tree back to its roots in Belarus.

- We were relentless parents and determined that we weren't going to leave a stone unturned.

- When I couldn't find a match in my family and in the registry, one of the next steps that we took was, "Hey, maybe there's some family members out there who we don't even know that we have."

On this side, we just have the genealogical information, the family tree information that we know about everybody.

- At one point I knew their family tree better than I knew my own.

- This is my father's grandfather And he was from Sopotskin as well, so I just made these things.

- So we thought, "Well, we'll try and find somebody maybe who's distantly related."

And as a result of that, the Feinbergs sent a group of people to Belarus.

- What are we doing, we're packing for Belarus.

I wish I was going.

So do you.

Rosalie doesn't.

- So then it was late fall of '94 and I received the phone call on a Friday, how would I like to go to Minsk next week?

Minsk, Belarus, on this mission to find Jay's genetic needle in a haystack.

(fast-paced music) There was just this new awareness of bone marrow and helping a stranger, and Pikuach Nefesh and the Talmudic verse, "If you save one life, it's as if you've saved the world entire."

(fast-paced music continues) - Billy was a very, very young guy back then and didn't say no.

You know, he was willing to step up when called for someone who at that time was a complete stranger.

- This is a picture of Jay.

I don't know if you've seen what he looks like, but he is my age.

These are donors coming in.

A button from Jay.

(translator speaking in foreign language) (Bill speaking in foreign language) - Tell him that we really appreciate everything that he's doing by allowing his workers to come today and take time off to be tested.

(gentle music) - He took six weeks out of his life to tissue type donors, recruit donors, try to find long-lost family members from the shtetl where my father's family came from, called Sopotskin, right on the Polish border.

- [Rochelle] We sent a crew of people and they actually did bone marrow testing with people in that community.

- [Jay] Billy actually went to the shtetl, went to the street where the Feinberg house was located, with the chickens walking around on the unpaved dirt streets.

- [Billy] Does he know anyone by the name of Feinberg?

Solomon Feinberg or Jacob?

(translator speaking in foreign language) (neighbor speaking in foreign language) - [Translator] Yeah, he remember.

(local speaking in foreign language) - And we found a man in particular whom we're pretty sure was a relative.

- There is a phrase in Hebrew, Pikuach Nefesh, and it means, to save someone's life.

Even if you cannot be a donor, you can help out by talking to people.

By telling them that you know a little bit about Jay Feinberg in America.

- He has that passion to believe that no is not an appropriate answer when it comes to searching for a match for a patient needing a transplant, when, you know, one donor, one individual out there could be their only hope.

He did a remarkable job and tested 500 people, and Bill has continued to be involved, couriering bone marrow and stem cells all over the world.

He's the one who taught me the importance of something called a BHAG, which is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.

And while my match didn't come from those drives, we were able to provide those donors to the Hematology Institute in Minsk and save other lives in Belarus as a result.

(rhythmic jazz music) - I was diagnosed with leukemia on March 20th, and fortunately I found a donor, and now, with a bone marrow transplant, I was cured.

- Unfortunately, my friend Jay Feinberg is also seeking a bone marrow transplant, but he has not found one yet and his condition is accelerating.

(upbeat music) - Over the course of a four-year period, we ran 225 donor drives and tested upwards of 60,000 people.

Which at that time was unheard of.

And after a couple of years of chemotherapy, there came a point where the medication wasn't working anymore.

And my blood counts were getting out of control.

The opportunity to have a transplant was diminishing, because once the disease got to a point where you were in that blast crisis where the cancer was completely out of control, a transplant wouldn't even help anymore.

And it was at that time that a young man in Chicago, a college student, contacted us.

And I remember the evening that he called when we were sitting at home in New Jersey and said, "I want to run one last drive for Jay."

(rhythmic music) - I was in contact with the Feinbergs, and especially Mrs.

Feinberg, would speak to her probably a couple of times a week and get updates about Jay, and unfortunately things were really not going very well.

His blood levels were not looking very good, and they started telling him that it was time to, to really stop working on drives and more focus on that they really have to do the bone marrow transplant as soon as possible.

It was really around that time that actually the Feinbergs found a possible match for Jay, a young woman from Brooklyn who was tested in Israel, who was considered a major mismatch, but the doctors were really pressuring them that we really have to do something here or else he's not going to make it.

- Requesting more information about being a donor for my son.

- So when we came to them with the idea of running this drive in Milwaukee, they really didn't think it was such a good idea because they were now just hyper focused on him going through this possible transplant.

- And my parents said, "You know, we really appreciate that, but unfortunately it's too late at this point, this is the direction that we're going.

But by all means, go ahead and run the drive because you might help somebody else out there in need."

- They told him that the young man that he saved is 24 years old and had the transplant.

- And the reason why he wanted to run that drive is because a drive that we had run in Canada had found a match for a friend of his, and his friend had a transplant.

So he wanted to pay it forward and close that circle.

So naturally, we wanted him to be able to have the opportunity to do that.

- We had a feeling that we really should push through and do it.

And eventually Mrs.

Feinberg said, "You can do it, but just to explain to you how time is of the essence," they said, "If you want to run this drive, labs have to process it within two or three days."

- And that morning, one of the volunteers who was supposed to go, who happened to be a nurse, couldn't, so her sister went in her place, really just to hand out flyers.

(gentle music) - Always within my upbringing, there was these Torah and Jewish values of helping people, being kind, doing good, and creating good in the world.

I teach kindergarten at the Torah School of Greater Washington, and I teach the Judaic portion of the curriculum.

- I made the nose and the eye.

- Oh, I can see that then.

What else can you make on the face?

That Sunday morning, we woke up, and I remember Benji's parents came to pick us up from our house.

But I remember when I got into the car, Cheryl Merzel, Benji's mother, who was a phlebotomist, asked me, "So Becky, are you going to get tested?"

I thought to myself, "What, tested?

I'm just going to volunteer, what does this have to do with being tested?"

And then I said to myself, "No, I'm not getting tested.

I'm going to do a mitzvah, I'm going to help out."

(upbeat music) - [Benji] She was there as sort of the welcomer, to hand out the intake forms.

And there was also a videotape of what Friends of Jay did, about leukemia, about transplants, the story.

(upbeat music continues) - I did it with a smile, I greeted everyone, handed them the papers.

I felt very important and very official.

- For chronic myelogenic leukemia- - And meanwhile, while I was standing there, there was a video playing on a TV screen behind me.

People who had leukemia being interviewed, and people who had donated bone marrow being interviewed.

And I just remember listening to it and starting to feel moved and touched by it, and a little bit inspired, and wow, what an amazing thing to do and how you could change someone's life.

I'm giving out the forms, the video's playing in the background, I'm starting to be moved and understand what this is about, and it starts to occur to me, maybe I would want to get tested.

(upbeat music continues) The drive continued, and I kept thinking to myself, "Should I get tested, should I not get tested?"

It didn't even occur to me that I could be a match for anyone.

(upbeat music continues) And all the people in the group started talking about it.

"Becky, are you going to get tested, are you going to get tested?"

And suddenly I decided, "I'm going to get tested, I want to do it."

So we called my parents, and my parents said it was okay.

Now at this point, the drive is over, it's packing up, nobody's there anymore, all the people are gone, they've packed up all the rooms.

And Cheryl Merzel, my neighbor, she drew blood, and I remember watching it go in, like being plopped down into that styrofoam case with all the other tubes.

And it was the last tube of blood to be drawn at that drive.

(gentle music) - The drive was probably about four or five hours.

Everything ran very smoothly, and it was over.

And again, we were packing things up as, and this is when she approached me and said, "Listen, I've been playing this video on a never-ending loop.

Jay was on the video, and I really, I'm very scared of needles, and I even told your parents before, as I was driving up here, that there'd be no way I'd want to be tested.

But after seeing the video, it really touched my heart, and I really feel the necessity to be tested."

She spoke to her parents, her father, Dr.

Faibisoff, he's a gastroenterologist, and she asked permission.

And we said, "Okay."

And when telling the story, I can testify there's absolutely no exaggeration here.

If you look at the roster in terms of the names of people tested, Becky Faibisoff was the last individual tested at that Milwaukee drive, and was the last individual tested for the more than 55,000 people at over 225 drives that were run in Jay Feinberg's name.

She was the very last person to be tested.

(uplifting music) - It was like a Friday afternoon and Benji Merzel came and knocked at my door and he told me that I was a match for Jay Feinberg.

When I heard this, I was flabbergasted, I was shocked.

I couldn't believe it.

I felt like I had won the lottery.

Everyone wanted to be a match for Jay Feinberg.

I couldn't believe it.

Thousands and thousands of people tested.

He had been told that it was going to be impossible for him to find a match.

And right away I said, "Of course, I'll do it."

I felt like I was one in a million.

It was so amazing for me to feel like I was someone unique or I was someone special.

That I had this opportunity to help someone in a way that no one else could help him.

And how it happened in that way where it was the last drive and I was the last person tested, there was just such a feeling that God was running the world.

Yeah, and God was taking care of Jay.

And it's very clear that what Jay went through, how it was such a painful struggle for him, and it was such a challenge, but the good that it brought into the world.

Jay took this experience and changed the world.

(cheering and applauding) And made the world a better place.

And really created something that did not exist before.

It's such a beautiful demonstration of the power of an individual.

And then after Jay had the bone marrow transplant and he recovered, what he's accomplished is amazing.

He's created an organization, the Gift of Life organization.

There's been thousands of matches and transplants and stem cell donations, and now he's doing scientific research for cures for cancer.

- The test results came through fax, the old-fashioned fax machine, on sheets that were in rows.

And the very last row, which was the very last donor, turned out to be my match.

It was Becky.

And a year after the transplant, Becky saved my life.

And she saved not just one life, she saved many lives over the course of time.

(gentle music) It was emotional.

It was very emotional that after 60,000 people, it turned out to be the last one.

For me and my folks, as we were sitting down and looking at that, we started to look back at the prior 3 1/2 years that had transpired, and all of the things that we had done and it all boiled down to this defining moment.

So just like I was positive throughout the entire process of running the search for a donor, I approached the transplant the same way.

Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of setbacks.

There were a lot of points where they didn't think I was going to make it through the night.

But you have to stay positive.

And I believe that that is extremely important, regardless of the kind of medical crisis that people are facing.

- Jay's transplant was not a simple one.

He was treated with probably as aggressive regimen as we can use.

He had graft-versus-host disease, he had liver dysfunction.

He had a septic necrosis of his hip.

I mean, Jay went through, when I say we took people to the brink and Jay was at the brink.

(gentle piano music) - Anything from infections, an infected central line, to reactions to blood transfusions, devastating reaction to a particular antibiotic that they gave.

So many different things.

So many different things.

But that's part and parcel of going through a transplant is that you never know what to expect.

(gentle piano music continues) Thankfully, the human body, and in particular the brain, has an incredible superpower of enabling you to forget those things that were so horrible.

The good thing is that now I couldn't even tell you because I don't remember.

(uplifting music) Being diagnosed, running through the donor recruitment drives, finding that match, having that transplant, was very much a journey.

But it was only the beginning of the journey, as it turned out.

(uplifting music continues) After four years, and finally having my transplant and recovering from my transplant, my seat in law school was still being saved.

In fact, the dean of the law school reached out and said, "Hey, I know you're doing well and recovering.

When are you going to come back?"

And that's when I told him that I really appreciate what he's done, but I'm not coming back because I'm paying it forward.

That there's something very important in life that I want to achieve, and that's to ensure that no patient die for lack of a donor for a transplant.

This wasn't just a campaign to save one life, but rather a mission to save many.

And that was very important to me and very important to my family from the very beginning, that this not be a circumstance where we were doing some private donor drives that were only going to benefit Jay, but rather put them into the registry so that they would help everybody out there in similar circumstances.

After I recovered from my transplant and made the decision that all of these resources, this tremendous infrastructure that we had built with so many volunteers, and all of the procedures and processes and connections and contacts that we had in place, it couldn't just stop, not with so many patients out there who were in need.

So we made the decision that Friends of Jay would transform into one of the global registries, and it became the Gift of Life Marrow Registry, with a mission to cure blood cancer through marrow and stem cell transplants.

(uplifting music continues) - We were in Italy.

- Oh wow.

- We were in Tuscany.

- In Tuscany you got the call.

- Yeah.

- Oh my gosh, wow.

- It was great, so.

- What's remarkable about Jay's story is that somehow we all find the right thing to do with our lives.

I would never wish cancer on anybody, but look at what Jay turned that into.

- The statistics for this month so far, 186 requests have come in.

When you look at our recruitment over the years, from 1991 to the present, we've actually recruited and tested about 850,000 people.

So far, Gift of Life Marrow Registry has facilitated 6,000 transplants.

(upbeat music) Most likely about 60 to 70% of those patients are alive today thanks to the kindness and generosity of their donors.

- My name is Natalie Hughes.

I live in Greenville, Mississippi.

(upbeat music continues) - [Jonathan] Before she was ill, she enjoyed outings and adventures with the family.

She was a fun, real loving, silly character.

She's always been very smart.

- I had just came back from a yearly beach trip that my family did, and then two weeks later I drove to the hospital.

(helicopter whirring) The doctors, they said I had aplastic anemia.

There was no cure.

I thought there was really no hope for me.

I thought I was just going to be another, another one thrown into the pot of illness, never coming back out, you know?

(gentle music) Like some sort of little puppet, like somebody just dwindling over the world of life and death.

I thought I was not going to be able to experience life and just sit around like a nobody while everybody else just kind of, would just watch me in confusion while I wasn't doing the things that other kids were doing.

- They had treated her with immunosuppressants for about a year and a half.

That treatment was a shot in the dark and it ended up failing and we started scrambling for what essentially ended up being the cure, was the marrow transplant.

(uplifting music) - I thought I was in a dream, that I actually got 100% match.

- [Jonathan] Over 5,000 people have received a gift of life.

It's amazing.

Gift of life is a godsend.

- [Announcer] Samantha!

(crowd cheering and applauding) - I'm a fix it person and it's not fun when you can't fix something.

And no matter how big a shovel you think you have, without help, you can't dig your way out of some holes.

Without humanitarians like Jay, you, there would be no hope.

And when you can't wrap your mind around something, or trying to save your child, and then in walks the social worker with this packet says, "Would you like to try Gift of Life?

Let's put her on the registry."

Absolutely.

And then you can start seeing the sunlight.

We have a sit down?

- Yes.

Look at the beautiful tree.

- Look at the beautiful tree.

- Beautiful nature.

- You want to go up at the top?

- Yes, tippy top.

- We're very excited to meet our donor.

Takes a special kind of person.

- I feel very emotional about that, that somebody could go to a complete stranger and do something out of this world for them.

(uplifting music continues) - This is Natalie and Jonathan.

(crowd applauding) - If you've ever been to one of these events where the recipient meets the person that donated, it is really something.

(crowd applauding) (crowd continues applauding) - [Jeff] You saved my life.

- Out of the 6,000 patients who have had transplants because of donors in the Gift of Life Registry, while we don't know the exact number of patients who have survived long term, we do know that many thousands did.

Reminds me that it only takes one person to save a life, and it could be anybody out there.

It starts with Becky and her decision to save one life and has continued to all of the donors who came after her who decided that they wanted to save a life.

(gentle piano music) - So it's 2013.

My wife lets me know about a 5K race sponsored by a group called the Gift of Life.

(gentle piano music continues) They were of course offering an opportunity to swab your cheeks.

It was simple, it was painless, and frankly, it was forgettable.

Fast forward to 2018, I'm coming off of the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska.

(uplifting music) This is just about the furthest thing from my mind.

And I get a call and it's Gift of Life informing me that I was a potential match.

(uplifting music continues) I was shocked to receive the call, but what I'm thinking about is that this is an opportunity to really do something meaningful.

Any chance to save a life is, of course, in the Jewish religion, something that you must do.

(gentle music) I have this picture of what this boy is and what this boy looks like.

I can only imagine the anguish that this boy's parents must have gone through.

As a parent, I think about what goes through their mind.

There are so few opportunities that you have to make a difference in this world.

(audience applauding) (audience continues applauding) (audience continues applauding) - I've been waiting two years to turn around and say thank you.

You gave our son and our whole family a second chance at life.

We could never say thank you enough.

- Many of us know that every three minutes, someone in the United States is diagnosed with a blood cancer.

The news is devastating to families, and seeing this beautiful, healthy boy filled with life and with a bright future, who I will forever be connected through, not only through our bone marrow, but through a dinosaur, brings joy to my heart.

(door beeping) - Good morning.

- Good morning.

- How's everybody doing?

I think I have the greatest job in the world, because every day I get to shake the hands of the donors who walk in our door to donate their stem cells.

- [Nurse] This is Ayla.

- Hi, nice to meet you.

- Nice to meet you.

- I'd shake your hand, but I know your hands are pretty occupied right now.

We can do that, we'll do that.

Very, very nice to meet you, how you doing?

- Good.

- I thank them for being heroes, and tell them that I was a patient myself and that my life was saved because of somebody just like them.

(uplifting music) - He was meant to survive.

His mother was going to make sure he survived, and somebody somewhere knew that this guy would then take that and save thousands of lives.

(rhythmic music) I'm so happy for him because he found a partner.

After his mom, his mother and dad died, he really had nobody.

He found Grace, her son.

He's got a whole family that he loves and he can do something else besides the science and what he was put on this Earth for.

(rhythmic music continues) - [Grace] Meeting Jay really opened up a whole new world that I had no idea that existed.

(rhythmic music continues) It's amazing to be able to do something so great as saving lives, and everything started with Jay, and Jay and Becky, of course.

His team is a family and he works together with everybody.

We don't see color, we don't see religion, we don't see anything, but we see people, and helping people and doing the best that we can, giving a hand, giving a hug or giving a smile, or saving that person's life.

- He who saves a life, it's as though you saved the entire world.

Jay Feinberg, you're not only saving lives, you're saving a generation.

And I want to thank you for the organization you set up and the lifetime of work.

(audience applauding) (upbeat music) - What made Gift of Life unique in the beginning was that we had a focus to improve the representation of a particular ethnic group that was woefully underrepresented in the donor pool, Jewish donors.

And we succeeded, it took a very long time.

We went from less than 5% to upwards of 80% likelihood of finding a match, and successfully replicated the model so that we can help other underrepresented populations.

(upbeat music continues) - They tried to find a match donor for us.

They did the blood test like all my kids and we wasn't matching.

- So they said it'll be harder because we're people of color.

We're from Pakistan, so it's harder to find a donor for that.

So they said that they're going to have to go through a registry called Gift of Life to find her donor.

- In my family, she was the baby and everybody loved her and I was so scared like I'm going to lose her.

Then they find someone for her.

They told me she's going to get a transplant thing, Allah, you know?

As you know, she came back to our life.

- [Evie] I'm working on an initiative to diversify the stem cell registry.

- When was the last time you saw Jay?

- Oh, I saw him just recently.

The statistics are really horrible for people of color.

If you're Latino, Hispanic, you have a 45% chance.

If you're Asian Pacific Islanders, you have a 40% chance.

And if you are Black or multiracial, you have a 25% chance of getting a match.

Okay, that's horrible.

And it's only because people haven't been into these communities, working on getting them into the registry.

- [Interviewer] What is it like to meet your donor right now?

- There are no words, I'm so excited, I'm thrilled.

I was looking for this opportunity, just waiting for this day to come.

I'm here because of you.

You've given me the gift of life.

- Thank you!

- Thank you so much.

Thank you.

- This is Miami.

We have an incredibly large Hispanic population here.

We have a sizeable Black population here.

I thought, we can do some work.

We can really, really positively impact those numbers in your registry if we put some elbow grease behind it.

And we did.

We are making a difference.

- I want to thank the Gift of Life for doing the work they're doing, which is to help identify more people to donate stem cells or bone marrow for these life-saving procedures, and particularly the emphasis on ethnic minorities.

Gift of Life has changed those odds.

(gentle piano music) - We had an event for Gift of Life Day in Miami Beach, and the donor and recipient were both Black.

The recipient had sickle cell, a very tough disease to treat, and the only cure is a bone marrow transplant, but unfortunately, because there weren't enough Black donors in the registry, it was just like what I went through, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

And now we're helping to solve that problem.

We now have college students who intern for us on about 150 college campuses nationally.

(upbeat music) Gift of Life is not just an organization that swabs people's cheeks at donor drives.

We're also responsible for managing the donors when they're called as matches.

We operate the registry.

We operate the donor center that does the donor management.

We operate the collection center that collects the stem cells from the donors.

We operate the laboratory that processes those stem cells and gets them ready for the transplant, and sends them on their way with a courier.

We do all of these things.

(upbeat music continues) We've accomplished a lot over the years, but we should never rest on our laurels.

Half of the patients who can benefit from a transplant still don't get one, and that means that we haven't fulfilled our mission.

Yes, it's God's work, but it's not just one person.

It's the donors and it's the team of people who all come together to help make it happen.

The donors, the transplant physicians, the nurses, the people at the registry, the people at the donor center, the people at the collection center, the patients' families who are just as impacted with this as the patients themselves.

It's everybody coming together.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (uplifting music) Growing up, I learned a lot from my parents, their values.

Really is nice when donors come in to donate their stem cells and walk by that picture, and read the little caption underneath and see that these are the people who made it happen and why they did what they did.

(uplifting music continues) There are many flyers that don't just have my picture on them.

They have pictures of patients from the United States, from Australia, England, France, from everywhere.

When they came to us and said, "We want to run drives, but we don't have the resources to do this," my parents stepped right in and said, "We're going to help you."

They weren't the kind of people who said, "No, we're too busy focusing on our son."

They never did that.

It was always a matter of how we can help them too.

That's something that I will always remember.

"Don't give up," is the message.

Don't take no for an answer.

Be proactive.

Always look at things with a positive light and how you might be able to overcome a challenge.

(rhythmic electro music) (rhythmic electro music continues) (rhythmic electro music continues) (rhythmic electro music continues) (rhythmic electro music continues) - [Narrator] This program was made possible by Earl J. Luttner and Family, and is dedicated to Eli Hoch, the donor who saved Earl's life.

And heroic donors everywhere.

Additional major funding was generously provided by Doug Smith.

James C. and Audrey S. Foster.

Julia W. Parker.

The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America's Corporate Responsibility Team.

(uplifting music) (gentle music) (upbeat music)