A Stanford professor spearheads an innovative campaign for bone marrow donations, discovers Arthur J Pais
If Samir Pendses parents had followed the usual route, they would have sought out organisations that help air appeal for bone marrow donations -- an appallingly slow process, partly due to the Asian communitys reluctance to be donors. But Samirs smiling photograph, which appeared on Stanford Business School Professor Jennifer Aakers Facebook page, and e-mails from some of Aakers students collaborating with her on the just-launched One Hundred Thousand Cheeks project, reached wider, and faster.
The outreach drew 62 people at the Freemont Hindu Temple near San Francisco, which had also sent out the e-mail at the request of the Stanford 100K Cheeks campaign, seeking help for Sameer, 18, battling relapsed leukemia.
The 100k Cheeks campaign relies on social media to get 100,000 people signed up with the national bone marrow donor registry in America through cheek-swab drives like the one held at the Fremont temple.
The project is also aimed at creating a similar movement across India, thanks to the inspiration Aaker, a social psychologist and marketer, received from a former student, Robert Chatwani, social media innovator and head of global citizenship at eBay, whose fight to find a bone marrow donor for his friend Sameer Bhatia using social networks is featured in Aaker and her husband Andy Smiths recent book, The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media for Social Change.
The e-mail on Sameers behalf said: Due to the stage of his disease, he has a very short time window. Hence the need is URGENT.
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