Book: A Fatal Inheritance

 Book: A Fatal Inheritance

Author: Lawrence Ingrassia

Pages: 320

This is my 177th read for the year

This is the story of two families.  The Ingrassia family - the author's family - and the Kilius family.  Both of these families are riddled with cancer throughout their family tree.  The author lost his mother, two sisters, a brother, and a nephew all to cancer.  He takes us back to the 1960s when scientist Dr Li and Dr. Fraumeni started to delve into familial cancer to trace family trees and find out if it was genetic or environmental that was the root cause.  They discover the P53 gene, also know as Li-Fraumeni syndrome and if a person carried this gene, they would get cancer at some point in their lifetime.  It is extremely rare, but it set the path to find out if they could detect the cancers early enough and screne patients often enough, if they could keep them alive.  Moving on from that, they hoped to then be able to attack the inevitable cancer and cure it.  While the first part has been successful in catching cancers early, they are still trying to stop it before it gets any further.  It is passed on from generation to generation - sometimes without people being aware they even carry it before it is too late.

This is a fantastic book.  And very sad.  One story after another of babies all the way through adults who had the P53 gene and did all get cancer.  Hardly any of them survived - even with early detection.  It would riddle their bodies in a wide variety of places - breast, lung, brain, lymph, pancreas, etc and little could be done to stop it from coming.  It is more rare than the BRCA gene.  It was fascinating to read about the research as it progressed through the decades, and how Crisper (and even LCA) was mentioned near the end as gene therapy takes a forefront in controlling disease.  And beyond that were the stories of these two families and the heartbreak of what it must be like to know that if you have this gene, you will get cancer.  And it will almost always be fatal.  Very interesting read.

Stars: 4.5