Wagga's Margaret Cerabona and Annette Forsyth have been fundraising for children's medical research for more than three decades.
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The Children's Medical Research Institute Wagga branch has sent about $1.7 million to Sydney, where they have a research laboratory named in their honour.
And for Mrs Cerabona and Mrs Forsyth, the cause is a personal one.
Mrs Cerabona's son required extensive medical treatment for hydrocephalus, which causes a build-up of fluid in the brain.
She spent a lot of time in a Chicago hospital in the 1970s with her son, who needed six operations in his first year of life alone.
"It doesn't matter what your wealth is or what your status is ... it's all an even keel with this," she said.
Mrs Cerabona recalls being in the hospital with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin - who also had a sick relative.
She said the moon was never mentioned.
"You couldn't care less about anything other than your baby. That's how absolutely all consuming it is if you have a child that's ill," she said.
"Maybe you can't explain it to people who haven't had something like that."
Mrs Forsyth agreed, saying she had a nephew who died at just 14-years-old from leukaemia.
Mrs Forsyth, a former pathologist at the base hospital, comes from a well known family in the world of medical research.
Her grandfather, Sir Norman Gregg, was a Sydney ophthalmologist who is best known for discovering that pregnant women who caught rubella could go on to have children with birth defects.
"In 1957 he received an invitation from an Italian pathologist ... for a Nobel Prize in physiology, but he felt he hadn't written enough papers, and so humbly declined it," Mrs Forsyth said.
Sir Gregg worked with the paediatrician Sir Lorimer Dodds, who in 1958 founded the Children's Medical Research Institute.
Mrs Cerabona founded the CMRI Wagga branch in 1983.
"What's so important about this is we do send money to Sydney, but the research they do in Sydney involves the whole world," she said.
August 7 marked the CMRI's annual Jeans for Genes Day, which raises funds for the work being done at the institute in the field of gene therapy.
Gene therapy hopes to correct genetic faults and cure children born with one of the thousands of diseases that currently have no treatment.
"I just feel this is so important, this will always be happening ... I just hope that this branch keeps going on and on and getting stronger," Mrs Cerabona said.