On a still summer night in a seventeenth-century canal house in Amsterdams old quarter, Pia de Jong gives birth to a delicate, bright-eyed baby girl with a riddle on her back-a pale blue spot that soon multiplies. In a bare, air-conditioned hospital room, a doctor reveals the devastating answer: it is a rare and deadly form of leukemia, often treated with chemotherapy, a cure nearly as dangerous to a newborn as the disease itself.Pia and her husband...