 Good evening everyone. My name is Ruth Robbins and on behalf of the Smithsonian Associates. It's a real pleasure to welcome you all here tonight Just to make sure you're in the right room. This is the genetics program not the biblical program You're gonna be really surprised if you're expecting something about modern midrash because that's not what we're discussing in here Before I introduce the speaker can I ask you to please silence cell phones? They do work down here even though we're way underground Tonight you're gonna hear a debate between two genetic experts Susan Wolfe and Robert Green on a very timely subject is genetic information different These two have been prepping for a while, so I'm looking forward to a lively debate This program is designed to give you the opportunity to participate After you hear the debate and the speakers rebuttal We will hope you'll take some time to write some questions for them Which we will collect during the sherry and sweets break, which is about halfway through the program We have Index cards for you out there if you can write as clearly as possible your questions on those cards and hand them in to either myself or one of the volunteers and We'll be able to present them in the second half of the program as I mentioned there is a sherry and sweets The only downside is you cannot bring it back in here So we've given you enough of a break time that you can enjoy it outside and chat a little bit Before we open the debate, I want to first introduce our moderator dr. Eric Green who will in turn introduce our speakers Dr. Green is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health There are a lot of acronyms in both those names, but we're just going to skip over those right now It's a position. He's held since late 2009 Well, actually I have to use the acronym NHGRI NHGRI for National Human Genome Research Institute It's the largest organization in the world dedicated solely to genomics research and aims to advance human health through genomics research Previously he served as an NHGRI scientific director chief of the NHGRI Genome Technology Branch and director of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center While directing an independent research program for almost two decades Dr. Green was at the forefront of efforts to map sequence and understand eukaryotic genomes including significant start to finish involvement in the human genome project So please join me in welcoming Eric Green and then soon after Susan Wolfe and Robert Green