Boy, 11, Dies of Cancer After Fruitless Hunt for Marrow

Adam Brock, an 11-year-old Woodland Hills boy whose quest for a lifesaving bone marrow transplant inspired thousands of people to be tested as potential donors, succumbed last week to the leukemia he had battled for nearly two years.

An athletic boy until he was found to have acute myelogenous leukemia in August, 1989, Adam was told that his best chance of survival was a bone marrow transplant. But the odds of finding two people with compatible marrow is nearly 20,000 to 1, and a search of bone marrow registries proved fruitless.

Adam died Thursday at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Woodland Hills.

Adam’s parents, Larry and Laurie Brock, had launched a high-profile campaign to find a donor, pleading in newspaper and television interviews for people to undergo a simple blood test to see if their marrow matched the sick child’s.

Their quest attracted the attention of movie stars and professional athletes. The Los Angeles Clippers named Adam honorary ball boy during one game to draw attention to his plight.

Thousands of people responded to the appeals, lining up outside testing centers throughout Los Angeles. The Brocks also held dozens of fund-raisers to pay for the tests, which cost $75 each. A match was never found. Those who were tested, however, were added to national bone marrow donor registries and may have become donors for some of the 9,000 other cancer patients seeking marrow transplants.

Adam--who had won more than a dozen trophies for baseball and basketball before falling ill--was resigned to his illness, although he once asked his mother if he had done something to deserve it.

He also confessed that he was more afraid of a transplant than the leukemia itself. During the many donor drives, Adam usually looked away as people gave blood samples. “I don’t like needles, so I don’t look at the people getting tested,” he said during a drive last September at a Brentwood estate that attracted more than 600 people.

Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. Monday at Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth.