devoted to demonstrating the intellectual imperative of studying women, and of helping women

to understand their enormous importance in helping us refashion our essentially male models of
normal human function and the pathophysiology of disease. I advocate the use of biological
sex/gender as an important variable in medical investigation; I believe that to do so is to provoke
questions we never would otherwise have asked. Gender-Specific research is crescendoing into a
position of crucial importance in medicine; last month I was invited to address the Special
Interest Group in Women's Health at the NIH. To my great delight, they changed their name to
the Special Interest Group in Gender-Specific Medicine after my visit there. I think my career
has been varied and useful, and although I acknowledge that some of my path has been off the
beaten track, as it were, I think I have been instrumental in pointing out that studying women is
an intellectual imperative, that women's health is more than a political or feminist issue or a
marketing tool for hospitals and that ultimately, women are making men an offer they can't
refuse.

Marianne J. Legato, M.D., F.A.C.P. is an internationally known academic

physician, author, lecturer and specialist in women's health. She is
Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians
& Surgeons and the Founder and Director of the Partnership for Women’s
Health at Columbia University. She is a practicing internist in New York
City.

Dr. Legato founded the Partnership for Women's Health at Columbia

University in 1997. It is the first collaboration between academic medicine
and the private sector focussed 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.

Dr. Legato is the founder and editor of The Journal of Gender Specific
Medicine