Harvard Hosts Marrow Drive

Over 160 members of the Harvard community registered on Wednesday for a chance to donate their bone marrow to those in need of a transplant.

Several student groups contributed volunteers and advertisements to help host one of the very few bone marrow registration drives at Harvard. The event, sponsored by the Gift of Life Foundation, was held in Harvard Hillel’s Rosovsky Hall.

According to Paige M. LaMarche, a volunteer for the Gift of Life, Caucasians have a 73 percent chance to find a donor match, while minorities hover around seven to nine percent. People of mixed race have a one percent chance.

LaMarche said that the foundation started 20 years ago when the founder Jay Feinberg, who is Jewish, was “barely able to find a donor on the list” after being diagnosed with leukemia. According to LaMarche, at that time the chance of a Jewish man finding a bone marrow match was in the single digits, but now, due to the involvement of the Gift of Life, the number has risen above 70 percent.

Now, the goal of the Gift of Life is to increase the chance of finding a donor for a member of any ethnic minority.

Samuel G. Greenberg ’14, philanthropy chair of Alpha Epsilon Pi, was approached by the Gift of Life Foundation to help host a bone marrow registration drive at Harvard.

“The other Alpha Epsilon Pi chapters nationwide had shown their support so we thought the Harvard chapter would be the perfect choice,” LaMarche said.

Greenberg presented the idea to his fraternity and a host of other Harvard student groups. “There is a need for any ethnic minority to be involved in the event so there are better chances for people to find matches,” Greenberg said. Through Greenberg and the support of the Hillel, other organizations became involved and generated volunteers for the event.

According to LaMarche and Greenberg, the greatest obstacle in getting students to register is fear. “You think of a painful procedure involving a giant needle in your spine when you hear about a bone marrow transplant,” said LaMarche.

But the majority of cases no longer involve the classic bone marrow donation, in which a patient is sedated while doctors withdraw marrow from a large bone, usually the pelvic bone. According to the National Marrow Donor Program, in the majority of today’s cases, when a match is found stem cells are actually collected from the donor’s blood in a non-surgical procedure.