ASHINGTON - Charlie Fiske knows Al Gore didn't invent the Internet. But Fiske thinks Gore engineered something even more valuable when their paths crossed 17 years ago.
In 1982, Fiske, then a financial manager at Boston University, learned his 2-month-old daughter was dying of liver disease. He and his wife, Marilyn, spent months finding a hospital that would perform an organ transplant; only two in the country did. But locating the liver itself was nearly impossible.
There was no such thing as a national organ bank. For seven months, while his daughter languished at Boston's Children's Hospital, Fiske begged hospitals and the local media to join the search, finally turning to Representative J. Joseph Moakley, the South Boston Democrat, for help to tell his case on national television.
One week later, after a series of chilling coincidences, a healthy infant liver appeared.
Unbeknown to Fiske, Gore, then a 34-year-old congressman from Carthage, Tenn., helped prod a group of prominent pediatricians to listen to Fiske.
Gore does not tout his role in helping save Jamie Fiske, now a healthy 17-year-old high school senior in Bridgewater. But he gets plenty of credit for subsequently pushing a health issue that hardly rakes in votes: as the first member of Congress to hold hearings on organ transplants in 1983, and in 1984 helping to enact a national system to match donors with recipients.
''Gore was the catalyst. He put it on the national agenda,'' said Fiske, who is now a leading transplant advocate. He also runs a hostel in Brookline for families undergoing the surgery.
Yesterday, Gore met with a group of organ donors and recipients to discuss the latest hurdle in organ donations: persuading people to let relatives know they want to donate organs when they die.
Gore also announced a $13 million grant program for organ-donation programs - $937,000 of which is slated to go to the Education Development Center and the New England Donor Bank in Boston. And he presented the Organ Donor Leave Act, a program to let federal employees take a month off instead of the current limit of seven days for donating organs.
But in a roomful of organ donors and recipients, one of the first people Gore waved to was Fiske, 53.
Today, Fiske still flashes back to his desperation over his daughter's illness. ''There was nothing we would not have done,'' he said. ''Nothing. Nothing.''
Fiske and his wife, a teacher in Stoughton, knew nothing of their daughter's disease, biliary artesia, a bacterium believed to be picked up during pregnancy that causes an infant's liver to dissolve. All they knew was their baby's skin had turned yellow, and her abdomen was bloated from what they later learned was internal bleeding.
When they learned Children's Hospital would not perform a liver transplant, and that the University of Pittsburgh had a three-week waiting list just to be evaluated, they flew to the University of Minnesota, which promised to see Jamie right away.
However, except for a loose association of medical groups that shared tips on available organs, there was no organized way to find a healthy infant liver for their daughter.
Fiske called anyone he thought could help - local newspapers, television stations, pediatricians, and the Massachusetts congressional delegation.
In the fall of 1982, Fiske heard that the American Academy of Pediatrics was meeting in New York. The physicians' meeting was going to be broadcast live on television, and Fiske wanted to speak.
At first, the academy dismissed his request. Fiske turned to Moakley and the press. Two days later his phone rang, and he was invited to speak before the group, without ever knowing why the group had changed its mind.
On national television, Fiske told the doctors about his family's crusade. Hundreds of miles away, a couple in Utah happened to catch part of Fiske's speech. Five days later, as the wife was driving through a train crossing, a locomotive smashed into her car, killing their 11-month-old son.
Overwhelmed with grief, the husband nonetheless remembered seeing Fiske on television. He wanted his child's death not to be in vain. His hospital in Utah called Jamie Fiske's doctors, and within weeks she was given a new liver.
Only years later did the Fiskes learn that Moakley had turned to Gore, then chairman of a powerful House science and technology subcommittee. A year later, when Gore held congressional hearings, Fiske came to speak. When Gore helped write the National Organ Transplant Act, Fiske was there.
''We weren't his constituents. We hadn't met him,'' he said. ''But we came to him as a family. ... And he reacted as a parent.''
