As you read this page, your heart is shuttling a ruby stream of blood around your body. Every thump disburses a cellular fleet armed with components to respond to the unconscious, unremitting demands you are making on your body right now: see, hear, perspire, think, breathe.

Two children who will be mentioned in this article died because their bodies could not do what your body is doing now---thriving. What’s worse, they may have died because you aren't registered with the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), and you may have been the only person in the world with the right genetic composition to save them.

Miraculously, nine-year-old Jillian Pasley’s life has been saved---twice---by a magnanimous bone marrow donor. Jillian qualifies as unique in many ways: She’s an identical twin, she’s a minority race, she’s got girl and “boy DNA,” and she has acute myelogenous leukemia, a disease usually confined to older adults.

A child’s death catalyzed Jillian’s union with her donor, Rhode Islander Joe Sena. Sena, of Cape Verde, African heritage, joined a bone marrow drive in response to local pleas for a little boy in need. The boy died before receiving a transplant, but his death only invigorated Sena to not only participate in, but also facilitate, bone marrow donor drives. Eventually, the NMDP delivered Sena to Jillian. At ages four and six, Jillian received bone marrow donations from Sena that saved her life. And Jillian beams proudly about the cells from Joe employed in her body. She ecstatically says, “I’ve got boy DNA!”

Thousands of others like Jillian await a tissue type-matching donor to give them life-preserving bone marrow cells. Many of these people belong to minority races and have a particularly hard time finding a donor. In fact, an undeniable deficit in minority donors exists, and recruiting new volunteers has become critical.

Helen Ng of the NMDP stressed the gravity of the minority donor dearth. Minorities tend to have a greater diversity of blood antigens, rendering the search for a perfect match more daunting. Migration and evolution have complicated the ease of finding a compatible match for many minority populations.

The NMDP deals with this genetic drift by maintaining a registry of donors that sprawls across continents, embracing 30 countries. The NMDP also deploys couriers to hand-deliver harvested cells to waiting patients.

Along with the NMDP, technology has made cell donation easier. To join the registry, cheek-cell swabs are quickly replacing traditional blood drawing techniques. If and when a match is found, the donor's cells are now often captured from drawn blood rather than from cells taken from the donor’s pelvis.

Donated cells are infused into the recipient’s body, which has been devastated by radiation therapy—--leaving a landscape ready to be seeded with new cells. The donated cells will optimally begin to multiply within three weeks, and the patient will have a 40--60 percent chance of survival.

Sadly, Jillian’s identical twin sister, Jade, died from her disease. She fell ill in her infancy, months before Jillian, and had a different donor. Jade died one year to the day she began her first chemotherapy treatment. Jessica Pasley, Jade and Jillian’s mother, has the joy of seeing Jade's twin in Jillian but also has the constant reminder that someone with that same face is missing in her life. The Jade Pasley Family Patient Assistance Fund was created in Jade’s memory.

As steely mom Jessica would say, “Get your game face on.” Go fight cancer. Someone may be waiting for you to save their life. Visit www.marrow.org for more information.