Honoring our fellows
This was a signal year for us: our silver anniversary. We reviewed the history of our organization in a video that cited and celebrated the chief supporters, advisors, collaborators and organizations that helped us build our Foundation. We addressed many challenges over the years: the first and most difficult was to prove not only that biological sex determined physiology and therefore that studying women as well as men was crucial. Then came the advent of what is now called personalized medicine, which predicted that gender would no longer be relevant to our assessment of individual health but which turned out to be wrong; in fact, the modification of gene expression by biological sex/gender is ever more evident as research progresses. Other significant insights we have achieved include the fact that the individual human’s personal experience and environment moderate that individual physiology in real time. Thus, the historic and artificial separation between scientists who study the molecular biology of sex and students of the impact of social, cultural, and economic experience on human physiology has been erased: the two are inextricably intertwined. Moreover, it is now established that the physiologic consequences of environmental factors can be transmitted to future progeny in a sex-specific manner. Another harvest of this period has been tremendous insights into human physiology by the exponentially expanding studies of the sexually dimorphic impact of space travel and of extraterrestrial colonization on human biology.
