I would like to see myself at my wife’s side awaiting the miraculous moment of my daughter’s birth as most fathers do. But in truth I was gowned and gloved like a surgeon, with a blue, sterile sheet spread out in front of me, and a long syringe in my hands, poised to harvest the maroon gush of blood cells from the umbilical cord. When I cut that cord, part of me was the father, but the other part an oncologist. Umbilical blood contains one of the richest known sources of blood-forming stem cells—cells that can be stored away in cryobanks and used for a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia
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