We conceptualize humanity’s ever more successful effort to explore space as no less than a Third Renaissance in which men and women are engaged in an ever-expanding and ever more successful effort to implement human existence on other planets beside our own. With increasing intensity and frequency, our most accomplished pundits warn that our continued existence on Earth faces an uncertain future. Climate change, the possibility of nuclear warfare, collision with other celestial elements like asteroids, the invasion of infecting agents for which we have no defense, and ultimately the collapse of the sun itself are all possible scenarios that make it imperative and indeed, a moral responsibility, to explore alternative worlds on which we survive. Clearly, we are addressing these warnings: we have achieved enough progress in engineering and in our understanding of how best to address human physiology for some to predict that we will have permanent human settlements on Mars by 2036. The seminar we held in Florence on September 13-15, 2023 featured a unique assembly
of world-class scholars who examined the current information on what we have achieved and equally important, what unsolved challenges we face -as well as the unanticipated issues we will inevitably meet in the future. Not only did we address the twin threats of space (radiation and microgravity) to men
and women’s survival, but we are also considered the complex issues of the governance of harvesting and distribution of resources of these new worlds by nations and governments with vastly different cultures and objectives. We are also considered the moral principles involved in the preservation of the integrity of the environment of the planets on which we choose to visit, explore and on which ultimately to establish permanent civilizations. The solutions to the questions we are framing do not all have clearly defined answers: will we have to alter human physiology by innovative new methodology to ensure adaptation to entirely new environments? How will we regulate various nations’ successes and competition in harvesting the resources of new worlds? And what moral principles must we fashion to ensure the integrity of the planets we eventually visit and from which we extract elements of value? All of these issues, and more, form the basis of our deliberations.
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.”