A Place of Healing and Hope for a Cure

"There's no real decline now in terms of his muscle strength," Dana said. "He's not falling. He doesn't bound upstairs, but he can get up."

Still, "we're under no illusion that he's fine and is going to continue to get better," Joel said. Because muscular dystrophy is so all-encompassingly debilitating -- typically, children require a wheelchair by age 10 and develop heart complications by their late teens -- most of the existing funding went primarily toward subsidizing the cost of care.

The Woods think bigger: "We're about the cure," Joel said.

So Joel and Dana, both lobbyists, tapped their contacts in Congress to try to effect change.

So far, they've been successful: the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have allocated funds toward muscular dystrophy research.

They're hoping that investing money in drug screening and aiming thousands of compounds at a specific target -- already identified as the dystrophin gene -- will yield some small result.

"Here you have a kid who 100 percent will die," Joel said. "Every kid dies. And your latter years are grim. It's my job as a parent to say, 'Of course you've got to be gung-ho.' You've got to have hope. But it's not irrational hope."

Joel said that "cure" might be too strong a word for Hoffman's current work, "but in terms of driving this really cruel trajectory to a halt, all the things he is doing could be combined to help."

A Week and a Half Left

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Young James Wood is a pioneer. By taking part in the clinical trials at Children's Hospital, the 8-year-old is helping future children who might be born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

You can help, too, by making a tax-deductible contribution to our annual Children's Hospital fundraising campaign.

Make a check or money order payable to "Children's Hospital" andmail itto Washington Post Campaign, P.O. Box 17390, Baltimore, Md. 21297-1390.

Goonlineto http://www.washingtonpost.com/childrenshospital and click on "Make a Donation."

To contribute by Visa or MasterCardby phone, call 202-334-5100 and follow the instructions.

Our total so far:$334,252.26.

Last year at this point:$404,700.10.

Our goal by Jan. 20:$600,000.