There are families whose histories are riddled with cancer: little boys and their young fathers dying from brain cancer, toddlers succumbing to eye cancer while their young mothers are diagnosed with breast cancer. Lawrence Ingrassia, an award-winning business journalist, comes from one of those families; he lost his mother, three siblings and a nephew to cancer. His family had no idea why they were dealt such a horrific hand. Environmental factors? A virus? The rotten luck of the draw? It never occurred to them to blame their genes. Until recently, most experts believed that genetics played no role in cancer. In A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, Ingrassia tells the story of how wrong these experts were.
While many researchers have investigated possible genetic links to cancer, Ingrassia focuses on the work of doctors Frederick Pei Li and Joseph Fraumeni Jr. Their research eventually led to the discovery of what is now known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare inheritable genetic mutation that increases the risk of many forms of cancer. People with LFS are likely to have cancer at a young age, even in infancy, and frequently can develop more than one type. Ingrassia’s family carries the mutation, although he didn’t inherit it.
Ingrassia weaves in the stories of his and other Li-Fraumeni families, never allowing the reader to forget the human suffering that spurred the research. His sister Gina’s story is particularly devastating. Months after Angela, the youngest Ingrassia sibling, died from abdominal cancer at 24, Gina developed a nagging cough. She was young, a long-distance runner and a nonsmoker. Her doctor thought she might have an infection. Instead, newly married and still grieving the death of her baby sister, Gina was diagnosed with a large cell lung carcinoma usually seen in smokers in their 60s. She was only 32 when she died.
Ingrassia is a brave and honest writer. He details the suffering endured by the dying and their families and acknowledges their fear, anger and confusion, as well as the many unanswerable questions around this genetic disorder. In this compassionate book, Ingrassia grants his subjects the dignity of being remembered not only for their deaths, but for their all-too-short lives.
