Ted Kennedy's Real Legacy on Women's Health

Even near the end, Ted Kennedy was still thinking about the nitty-gritty details of health care reform legislation. He spent some of his final weeks lobbying for an appointed temporary successor to his Senate seat after his death, so that someone would be in place to cast a vote when the health care legislation comes to the floor. But Kennedy's most lasting legacy in health care may turn out to be in research.

Besides pushing ahead on specific measures to expand stem cell research and funding for HIV/AIDS research, Kennedy also pushed for funds to be directed to the National Institutes of Health for biomedical research in 1993 and again in 2003. A provision in the 1993 NIH bill he co-authored was that women and minorities could not be excluded from that medical research.

I recall once that while going through some old research journals in college, a neuroscience professor explained to me that since so much of the older research was conducted on male subjects, even if researchers had wanted to include women, it just seemed like an unnecessary complicating factor, unless gender was the focus of the study. Now, the NIH Web site instructs grantees that, unless they can illustrate a compelling scientific reason for exclusion, research studies and clinical trials must include women and minorities in their pool of subjects. For a senator who spent most of his career working for a more inclusive approach to health care, I can't think of a better legacy.