She insists that sample populations in medical research must reflect the fact that women constitute 52 percent of the population. "The differences [in biology] between men and women are very distinct," she says.

Currently dean of the College of Medicine at Ohio State University, Healy notes that she is one of only three female medical school deans in the country, the same number as there were 25 years ago.

A bulldog for women's health issues, Healy recently wrote A New Prescription for Women's Health: Getting the Best Medical Care in a Man's World. In her book, she instructs women to be "assertive consumers" of their own medical care.

Healy says she perceives the gap between men and women's health research as a reflection of our "predominantly male-driven" society.

"There has been a long tradition of neglecting issues that are solely in the domain of women's health," she says.

The Debate Over Equality

Today, medical researches and the NIH appear to be moving towards ending that history of neglect.

The NIH no longer allows studies to exclude women without evidence that they are not affected by the disease under scrutiny.

"When we submit grants, it's actually an NIH requirement that we study women as well as men," says Dr. Eric B. Rimm, an assistant professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Rimm was a scientific collaborator on two studies of vitamin E consumption and coronary disease published in 1993--one on men, one on women--which were performed at the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School, of Public Health and Brigham and Women's Hospital.

"We're moving toward more equality in the funding of research," he says.

But some researchers believe the federal government would be applying a formulaic approach to science if it were to set quotas stipulating the number of ethnic minorities or women to be included in every new study.

Stampfer, the lead author of the vitamin E study on women, says it sometimes makes sense to oversample specific groups because they are predominantly affected by the disease in question. "[Allocations of funding] should be driven by science, not by politics," he says.

Stampfer says he disagrees with Healy's sentiment that the biologies of men and women are distinct enough to warrant separate research in every instance.

"We have to bear in mind that it's not different species here," he says. "For many instances, the biology is similar, if not the same, so we should not be forced to have the same number of men and women."