Gender-Specific Medicine after the Age of Darwin: Achievements and Challenges for Biomedical Science in the 21st Century.

Saturday, December 7, 2013 Columbia University

The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine hosted a symposium to discuss the achievements and challenges for Biomedical Science in the 21st Century. We currently stand at an unprecedented point in science and, in effect, in life, as science has made great strides in creating human-animal chimeras, and the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence have rapidly advanced. Each new discovery generates others at a rate that is producing an explosive record of accomplishment. The marriage of biology and technology is creating a revolutionary expansion of humans’ ability to change the nature of life, as we know it. FGSM Director and Founder Dr. Marianne Legato has assembled scientist as well as theologians, ethicists, lawyers, and economist to this informative program, which will serve also as a Continuing Medical Education (CME) symposium for physicians, to discuss how the new sciences in genomics, synthetic biology, chimera, stem cells, and artificial intelligence will significantly change the world. The symposium was held at Columbia University, New York, NY. Each day, scientists expand our ability to decode and manipulate not only gender, but also the genome itself. Researchers can manufacture new species using BioBricks, or chemicals off the shelf. Scientists are also making great strides in creating human-animal chimeras, and the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence have rapidly advanced as well. Each new discovery generates others at a rate that is producing an explosive record of accomplishment. The marriage of biology and technology is creating a revolutionary expansion of humans’ ability to change the nature of life as we know it.The following professionals discussed the ramification of these advancements for their respective field:

Symposium Faculty Speakers

The following professionals discussed the ramification of these advancements for their respective field:

Denise Batista, Ph.D.

• Genomics Associate Professor of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University
• Member of the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine
• Director of the Cytogenetics Laboratory at the Kennedy Krieger Institute
• Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland

Stephen R. Munzer, J.D.

• Synthetic
• Biology Senior Research Scholar and President Emeritus, The Hastings Center

Stan Franklin, Ph.D.

• Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Professor of Computer Science
• W. Harry Feinstone Interdisciplinary Research Professor, Institute for Intelligent Systems University of Memphis Memphis, Tennessee

• Justin Killian, J.D.
• Sherif Moussa, J.D.
• Ellen Levee, D.V.M.
• Charles Camosy, Ph.D

Science and technology are evolving at exponential rates. Through introducing the new sciences into the public consciousness, this project has allowed society as a whole to have proper input in matters that surround health and health care. The public has the power to either limit or increase the speeds at which the new sciences develop. The Foundation for Gender Specific-Medicine supports the investigation of the ways in which biological sex and gender affect normal human function and the experience of disease. Their programs support original scientific research in gender-specific medicine, create an evidence-based set of protocols to guide physicians and educate the lay public and the scientific/medical community.

Marianne J. Legato

Dr. Marianne Legato, Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University is an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer, and specialist in gender-specific medicine. She is founding member of the International Society for Gender Medicine and also the founder and director of The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University and its next iteration, The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. These enterprises are the first collaborations between academic medicine and the private sector focused solely on gender-specific medicine: the science of how normal human biology differs between men and women and of how the diagnosis and treatment of disease differs as a function of gender and sex. Her ground breaking textbook on Gender-and Sex Specific Medicine has been published in 2017 in the 3rd edition.

She has published extensively on Gender and Sex Specific Medicine, both scientifically and for the lay public. She is also the founding editor of the journal Gender Medicine, and the Journal Gender and Genome, published for the scientific community. In 1992, Dr. Legato won the American Heart Association’s Blakeslee Award for the best book written for the lay public on cardiovascular disease. She is a practicing internist in New York City and has been listed each year in New York Magazine’s “Best Doctors” since the feature’s inception in 1993.