Frederick Pei Li (; May 7, 1940 – June 12, 2015) was a Chinese-American physician. He is most famous for his discovery, together with his colleague Joseph Fraumeni, of Li–Fraumeni syndrome, which is caused by germline mutations of the p53 tumor suppressor gene and genetically predisposes families to high rates of cancer. Li was born in China and raised in the United States, where he worked at the National Cancer Institute as a pioneer in cancer research and later as a professor at Harvard Medical School. He died in 2015 of Alzheimer's disease. Life Li was born in Canton, China, and raised in New York City, where his parents operated a Chinese restaurant after World War II. His father, Li Hanhun, was a general in World War II (Second Sino-Japanese War) and the chair of Guangdong provincial government during later years of the war. Li also had a brother, Victor Hao Li, professor at Stanford Law School and past president of the East–West Center. He received a B.A. in physics from New York University, an M.D. from the University of Rochester, and M.A. in demography from Georgetown University. In 1967 he joined the Epidemiology Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). He served for 24 years, mostly at the NCI's field station at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. In 1991, he became head of Dana-Farber's Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Control, and retired in 2008. Later in life, Li was Professor of Clinical Cancer Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Professor of Medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and the Harry and Elsa Jiler American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor. In 1996, Li was appointed by President Bill Clinton to NCI's National Cancer Advisory Board. He died in 2015 of Alzheimer's disease. Discovery of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome In 1969, Li with Joseph Fraumeni identified 24 families with a high risk of cancer throughout generations of family members. Their research and discovery in the abstract of Li and Fraumeni's paper described their method and results as, "A search of the Cancer Family Registry of the National Cancer Institute revealed 24 kindreds with the syndrome of sarcoma, breast carcinoma, and other neoplasms in young patients. Cancer developed in an autosomal dominant pattern in 151 blood relatives, 119 (79%) of whom were affected before 45 years of age. These young patients had a total of 50 bone and soft