Marianne J. Legato
Marianne J. Legato, MD, PhD (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 1998 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’s normal physiology and their sex-specific experience of disease.
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 (Simon & Schuster, 1992), which won the Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association. 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 published the first textbook on gender-specific medicine, The Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine. The second edition appeared in December 2009. The third edition won the PROSE Award (Professional and Scholarly Excellence Award, presented by the Association of American Publishers (AAP)'s PSP Division) for the best book published in 2017 in the field of clinical medicine. The fourth edition was published in 2023. Her latest book, The Plasticity of Sex was released in 2020 by the Academic Press, which also won a PROSE Award. 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.
Dr. Legato is the author of several other books for the lay public 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) and most recently, Why Men Die First (Palgrave, 2008). 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, Japan, Panama, South Korea, Stockholm, and Vienna. She maintains the only gender-specific private practice in New York City, and she has earned recognition as one of the “Top Doctors in New York” by New York Magazine for the past 18 years.
Dr. Legato’s recent publications include The Plasticity of Sex: The Molecular Biology and Clinical Features of Genomic Sex, Gender Identity and Sexual Behavior (Academic Press, 2020), which received the American Publishers PROSE Award for Best Book in Biomedicine, and Sex, Gender, and Epigenetics (Elsevier, 2023). She is the editor of the fourth edition of Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine: Sex and Gender-Specific Biology in the Postgenomic Era (Academic Press, 2023). Dr. Legato is also an editor of Building a Spacefaring Civilization: Advancing the Renaissance of Science, Medicine and Human Performance in Civilian Spaceflight (Elsevier, 2025), and is currently engaged in several works in preparation, including AI in Clinical Medicine, the Human Research Project, and a second edition of The Plasticity of Sex. She continues to lecture internationally and will give a major address at the seminar on men’s health in Panama in February 2026. She is a member of the Scientific Board of the Menarini Foundation and is planning a second major seminar in Rome on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine planned for Fall of 2026.
Updated December 31, 2025