The Most Important Thing You’ll Do Today

JONNY SINGER tells you how you can save lives by giving up 15 minutes of your time this afternoon.

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What are you doing this afternoon?

Whatever it is, I bet it can spare 15 minutes. Especially if that 15 minutes means potentially saving someone’s life. That’s what you can do today.

If you head down to Emma bar between 3pm and 6pm today, you can join the Anthony Nolan register.

You’re all clever people who are capable of using Google or clicking this link, and I’m hardly an expert, so I won’t run you through the charity’s benefits in great detail. All you really need to know, at this stage, is that by joining this register, and offering a teaspoon of saliva, you’ll get checked to see if you match up with people in need of a bone-marrow transplant. We’re talking mostly blood cancer patients, who’ll die unless a match is found.

You probably won’t match up. 999/1000 people on the register, give or take, never end up donating bone marrow. Most of them never give more than the 15 minutes required to join. But that 1/1000 gets a chance to be a hero…a bit like this guy.

Students are the perfect people to join the register. Since we’re the right age, most of us could actually stay on it for a long time, increasing the chances of a match – and if we did match up, few of us could claim we wouldn’t have the time for the transplant. We’re even (relatively) ethnically diverse – and that matters. But the vast majority of students don’t join up.

You can change that today. If your essay is 15 minutes late, so what? If (more like me) you play 15 minutes less Football Manager, use Facebook a little less, or make this the only Tab article you read today, it’s probably a good thing. There are few things you’ll do today that are likely to have a long-term impact on your life, or anyone else’s. This is one of them.

There’s really no reason not to do it – be a hero. See you at Emma bar.