michael amylon, professor at lucille packard children's hospital. it's a little more informal setting. >> cheryl: i've been going there for years and years and it's very special place? >> it actually is. it's a whole lot more fun being at camps than at the hospitals and for the families, its healing environment. >> kyle you who have done bone donor transplants. what is it like for them? >> a child that has a disease, it makem eligible for a transplant, you know it's a serious issue and the family, some of the things david mentioned it turns your life upside-down. everything revolves around the illness and there is a fear that no parent wants to face. it's probably the worst nightmare, is having a child with such a life-threatening illness. >> is transplant a last resort? >> for some diseases it's the first treatment we offer. that is often when there is no alternative. it's an intense processes and requires a lot of time in the hospital. there is a lot of side effects and a lot of medications that you can take for months and months. so certainly isn

today, he's one of abrecht's doctors at stanford's lucille packard's children's hospital, and the current president of the american society of clinical oncologists. >> at that time we were curing about 40% of children with cancer and in that interval, in that past 40 years or 35 years that i've been on scene the cure rates have improved dramatically such that now we cure probably 80% of all children with cancer. and we cure almost 90% of children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia the most common childhood cancer and a disease that was absolutely incurable in the 1960s. >> reporter: one of the discoveries that has led to success with children was learning the nature of the disease, something that was not fully understood 40 years ago. >> cancers are diseases of our genetics of our d.n.a. and we develop mutations in those cancer cells and those mutations are what cause the cancer and what drive the cancer and we now understand for example in a disease like leukemia that there are multiple different types of leukemia even though they look the same under the microscope which are driven by a d