I’m headed to Germany for the week to visit a bone marrow collection center there. Most people don’t know this, but 25-33% of all the world’s unrelated volunteer bone marrow donors are managed by the German national registry.

Even though bone marrow transplants were pioneered in the US,  Germany and the Netherlands that took a lead on building registries where people could look for donors if someone didn’t have a suitable sibling donor. As they started to build their own registries, they also got backing from their governments to recruit people to them as well. German participation in the bone marrow registry is about double the US (almost 10% vs 5%).

Anyway, I’ll be giving two talks (thankfully with a colleague) that are supposed to go 3 hours. Since I only know about 10 German words, this could get interesting. Fingers crossed for me!