The Foundation celebrated one of the most successful evenings at the Doubles Club. Our gala this year centered around the remarkable achievements of a husband and wife duo: Penny and Jay Lieberman. Penny, has been an advocate for our mission for over a decade. She is a talented entrepreneuse and is the founder and CEO of several organizations devoted to creating and developing safe, creative and educational toys for children. Jay’s interest in the Foundation began when Penny told him about our work; he responded to us with a major three-year commitment from his Derfner Foundation.
Jay Lieberman formed the Derfner Foundation 25 years ago with his senior partner, Harold Derfner and Mr. Derfner’s wife, Helen. Jay told us that the mission of his foundation is simply to ensure that it would do all the good possible. A review of some of the major interests of the foundation reflects Jay’s dedication to first-class heath care and to providing opportunities for the best education possible for needy and talented children.
His funding has been essential in supporting the work of talented young investigators at Johns Hopkins. Derfner support also underwrote the production of our new textbook, which contains contributions from 50 of the world’s most accomplished scientists examining gender differences at the molecular level.
Penny and Jay’s efforts are carefully thought-out and well-placed. We are privileged to celebrate their achievements.
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THE FOUNDATION FOR GENDER-SPECIFIC MEDICINE
ANNUAL GALA May 3, 2017. DOUBLES
Click Here to Download 2017 Gala Journal
Marianne J. Legato, MD, Ph. D. (hon. c.), FACP is an internationally renowned academic, physician, author, lecturer, and pioneer in the field of gender-specific medicine. She is a Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and an Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Legato is also the Director of the Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, which she founded in 2006 as a continuation of her work with The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University. She received an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015 for her work on the differences between men and women.
At its core, gender-specific medicine is the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender. Dr. Legato’s discoveries and those of her colleagues have led to a personalization of medicine that assists doctors worldwide in understanding the difference in normal function of men and women and in their sex-specific experiences of the same diseases.
She began her work in gender-specific medicine by authoring the first book on women and heart disease, The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Coronary Artery Disease, which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association in 1992. Because of this research, the cardiovascular community began to include women in clinical trials affirming the fact that the risk factors, symptoms, and treatment of the same disease can be significantly different between the sexes. Convinced that the sex-specific differences in coronary artery disease were not unique, Dr. Legato began a wide-ranging survey of all medical specialties and in 2004, published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in 2010 and the third edition, dedicated to explaining how gender impacts biomedical investigation in the genomic era, won the PROSE Award in Clinical Medicine from the Association of American Publishers in 2018. A fourth edition is forthcoming.
She also founded the first scientific journals publishing new studies in the field, The Journal of Gender-Specific Medicine, and a newer version, Gender Medicine, both listed in the Index Medicus of the National Library of Medicine. She has founded a third peer-reviewed, open access journal, Gender and the Genome, which focuses on the impact of biological sex on technology and its effects on human life.
Dr. Legato is the author of multiple works, including: What Women Need to Know (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Eve’s Rib (Harmony Books, 2002), Why Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (Rodale, 2005), Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008), The International Society for Gender Medicine: History and Highlights (Academic Press, 2017), and most recently, The Plasticity of Sex (Academic Press, 2020). Her books have been translated into 28 languages to date.
As an internationally respected authority on gender medicine, Dr. Legato has chaired symposia and made keynote addresses to world congresses in gender-specific medicine in Berlin, Israel, Italy, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. In collaboration with the Menarini Foundation, she is co-chairing a symposium on epigenetics, Sex, Gender and Epigenetics: From Molecule to Bedside, to be held in Spring 2021 in Italy. She maintains one of the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York.”
