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.
- Chimera & Stem Cell Research Distinguished Professor of Law UCLA School of Law Los Angeles, California
Thomas H. Murray, Ph.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
Panelist
- 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, 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.”
