Marianne Legato

Marianne J. Legato was born in 1935 in New York. During her childhood, she accompanied her father, who was a general practitioner, on his visits to patients' homes and hospitals. From a very young age, she aspired to pursue a career in medicine. Despite her father's initial concerns for her well-being, she decided to attend medical school. She enrolled at New York University College of Medicine, her father's alma mater, without familial support. Legato attributes her success during medical school and beyond to the mentorship she received from José Ferrer and M. Irené Ferrer, who were siblings of Mel Ferrer and whom she met at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. M. Irené Ferrer went so far as to personally speak with the dean of New York University College of Medicine to facilitate Legato's education there, even covering her tuition expenses. Legato has two children, Christiana and Justin, who grew up as part of the extended Ferrer family and affectionately referred to her as "gran".

Upon completing her medical degree in 1962, Legato pursued an internship and junior residency at Bellevue Hospital, followed by a senior residency at the Presbyterian Hospital of the City of New York. From 1965 to 1968, she served as a visiting fellow in cardiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In 1968, Legato assumed the role of instructor in medicine, marking the beginning of her academic career at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. Presently, she holds the position of Professor of Clinical Medicine at the institution. Legato is recognized as a Fellow of the American College of Physicians and a Diplomate of the American Board of Internal Medicine.

Since 1969, Legato has served as an attending physician at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, and since 1973, she has also been an attending physician at the Presbyterian Hospital in the City of New York. Currently, she holds the position of senior attending physician at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital and has been a senior attending physician at the Presbyterian Hospital since 1998. Legato has held various teaching appointments and committee memberships at both institutions. In 1997, she founded the Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

As the director of the Partnership, Legato has fostered collaboration between academic medicine and the private sector to conduct research on gender differences. Her objective is to ensure the inclusion of women in clinical trials relevant to the health of both genders and to promote the study of biological distinctions between men and women, as well as how gender influences disease diagnosis and treatment, ultimately benefiting all patients. The Partnership for Gender-Specific Medicine is actively raising funds for the establishment of the M. Irené Ferrer Professorship in Gender-Specific Medicine at Columbia University.

Legato has received various professional accolades for her contributions, including the Martha Lyon Slater Fellowship from 1965 to 1968 and the J. Murray Steele Award in 1971, both granted by the New York Heart Association. Her research on the structure and function of the myocardial cell was supported by a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health and research grants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. She has served on study sections to evaluate NIH grant applications at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. From 1995 to 1998, she served as a charter member of the advisory board to the newly established Office of Research in Women's Health at the NIH. During that time, she co-chaired the Task Force responsible for setting the research agenda on women's health for the 21st century.

In 1992, Legato received the American Heart Association's Blakeslee Award for her book titled The Female Heart: The Truth About Women and Heart Disease, published by Simon & Schuster. Her film, Shattering the Myths: Women and Heart Disease, earned her a first prize, known as a "Freddy," in the Women's Health category at the 1995 International Health and Medical Film Festival.

She was recognized as an "American Health Hero" by American Health for Women in 1997 and was honored with the Women's Medical Society of New York's annual Woman in Science Award in the same year. Ladies Home Journal named her a "Heroine of Women's Health" in the fall of 2000. Legato has been consistently recognized as one of New York's top doctors by New York Magazine, most recently in 2009.

In 2002, she received the Woman in Science Award from the American Medical Women's Association. She was featured in the June 1994 issue of Mirabella magazine's "1,000 Women for the 1990s" and was included in the New York Times list of accomplished healthcare professionals in the field of women's health in June 1997.

In 2004, Legato was one of the 300 American physicians featured in the National Library of Medicine's documentary, Changing the Face of Medicine. She received the National Council on Women's Health Award for distinguished service in gender-specific medicine in 2005. The Ladies' Home Journal established the annual Marianne J. Legato Award in Gender-Specific Medicine in her honor in 2006.[1]

In recognition of her work on the differences between men and women, Legato was granted an honorary PhD from the University of Panama in 2015.

In 2018, she was honored with a PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers for the best book on clinical medicine for Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine: Gender in the Genomic Era (Third Edition). Her book, The Plasticity of Sex: The Molecular Biology and Clinical Features of Genomic Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Behavior, won a PROSE Award in the Biomedicine category in 2021.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20090805151516/http://partnership.hs.columbia.edu/legato.html
• http://www.gendermed.org