2025 Richard Smith, MD Symposium on Cancer Care featuring Lawrence Ingrassia
Join us for this special online event as we welcome Lawrence Ingrassia as the next Richard Smith Symposium Speaker on Cancer Care on Monday, June 2, 2025 from 6:30-7:30 p.m.
An award-winning journalist, Lawrence Ingrassia is the author of A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, which weaves his moving family story with a sweeping history of cancer research, delivering an intimate, gripping tale that sits at the intersection of memoir and medical thriller. Join Lawrence on June 2 for a conversation about
loss, love, and family.
The Richard Smith Symposium on Cancer Care began as a generous gift from the Smith Family to carry on Dr. Smith’s commitment to quality and safety in the care of patients. This event is a unique opportunity to connect with a remarkable individual and gain valuable perspective. Mark your calendar and reserve your spot today!
About Lawrence Ingrassia
Lawrence Ingrassia is an author and journalist. In senior editing positions at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, he oversaw coverage of a variety of issues, directed award-winning journalism and hired dozens of reporters and editors. In April 2020, he joined the Dow Jones Special Committee, an independent body charged with monitoring adherence of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires to the highest ethical and professional standards.
Ingrassia’s second book, A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery, was published May 14, 2024, by Henry Holt & Co., an imprint of Macmillan. It's a non-fiction medical mystery as well as a memoir about his family's tragic cancer history. It tells the remarkable story of a couple of then-young doctors who were puzzled in the late 1960s by a high rate of seemingly unrelated cancers in some families and hypothesized that it might be hereditary. They were initially dismissed by many experts. But they weren't deterred. Over two decades later, aided by other pioneering scientists and by advances in molecular biology technology, they identified a very rare mutation in a critically important cancer gene as the cause of the cancers. In the process, the doctors helped to greatly expand the understanding of genetic causes of cancer. (What's now known as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome was named after them.) The book tells the parallel stories of the Ingrassia family's journey as we tried to understand why cancer killed Lawrence’s mom, two sisters, brother, and one of his nephews, along with the journey of the researchers as they endeavored to solve the mystery. In 2021, Ingrassia wrote an essay explaining why he embarked on this personal odyssey and decided to write this book.