Thousands of parents are being urged by companies to bank their baby's umbilical cord blood as insurance against the child or one of their family members developing leukemia or another disease requiring a marrow transplant. This insurance is costly, with Viacord Inc. of Boston, the major commercial cord blood banker, charging an upfront fee of $1,500, plus a $95 annual maintenance fee. But UC Davis hematologist and oncologist Carol M. Richman contends the service is a waste of money because most families will never need cord blood. She's also leery of the trend to introduce the profit motive into the blood-banking arena, given the history of viral contamination of blood products from commercial sources. "Nowadays, people are pretty tuned into the fact that anything to do with blood can't involve money," she says. "Besides, parents won't need to have their own private stem cell reserves because researchers, blood-banking societies and the Food and Drug Administration are working to create a system of nonprofit cord blood-banking centers." As director of the bone marrow transplant program at the UC Davis Cancer Center and director of the Progenitor Cell Lab at the Sacramento Medical Foundation Blood Center, Richman is heading the regional effort to get cord blood-banking off the ground in Northern California.