At year’s end, thanks are due to each and every one of you for your generous support of our work. You are invaluable to us. Your support has made it possible to continue our new journal, Gender and the Genome, funded new research in supporting young investigators, and made possible our travel to the Vatican in Rome at the invitation of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, a tremendous tribute to the value of our work. You also sent us to Vienna to deliver a keynote address to the International Society of Gender-Specific Medicine. Moving into the New Year, we have begun a collaboration with the Menarini Foundation in Italy to initiate a series of international seminars at which investigators from all over the world will assemble to address the most important topics in biomedicine. The first congress is scheduled for July of 2020 and will include a faculty that features Nobel laureates and world class experts from all corners of the globe. A series of important celebrations in the United States at which we will deliver keynote addresses has also been arranged for the beginning of the New Year. Our new book, The Plasticity of Sex, is at the publishers now and will appear in the Spring of next year. Your kindness has underwritten a new administrator, Michelle Tapia, who is already working on our May 14 gala at which I hope to welcome many of you.
Without you, none of this would have been possible. I have written personal notes to each of you to thank you for your generosity; it means everything to us to review what you have done during the past year to further our work. We here at the Foundation wish you every happiness for the New Year and hope your holiday season is rich with friendship and family reunions.
Warmest personal regards and deep gratitude,
Marianne J. Legato, Founder and President
Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine
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.”
