When Jennifer Garcia scheduled the birth of her daughter at South Miami Hospital, nurses asked her an unusual question: “After your baby is born, are you willing to donate the umbilical cord to save someone’s life?”<\/p>\n
She said yes: “What’s the point of throwing it in the trash if it can help other people?”<\/p>\n
When Natalia Garcia, seven pounds six ounces, arrived at 3:56 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the blood from the cord and placenta \u201d\u201d about a quarter cup \u201d\u201d was collected by those nurses, working in the hospital’s new public Cord Blood Donation Center.<\/p>\n
They flew it to a lab at Duke University in North Carolina, and the stem cells were spun off and stored at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The cells became part of a rapidly growing national bank of cord blood stem cells waiting to treat patients with leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, aplastic anemia, sickle cell and other diseases.<\/p>\n