 Thank you, Owen, for kind introduction and thank you especially for the hard work that's gone into organizing this exceptional meeting. Speaking for NIH and all the folks who are here, we're really welcoming this opportunity to hear from the community about where we need to go next with this very exciting area of science, which is just bursting with opportunity and potential for understanding aspects of human health that had been outside of our reach until recently and are now coming forward in a way that all of us are truly excited about. And as Owen has said, we are at a critical juncture here where the microbiome project having lived for a while in the common fund is now moving out into lots of other territories, lots of institutes involved. And it is a great moment to hear from all of you about where those opportunities are most compelling. We at NIH live unfortunately in challenging times when it comes to resources with things like the sequester having put us in a historically difficult position as far as being able to support all the science we would like to, all the more reason why we have to think carefully about how to set priorities and getting input from the scientists in this room. On this topic is a great example of the kind of thing that we're trying to do more and more of. So, Owen, thank you and your team of organizers for making this possible. Believe me, NIH is listening, participating, delighted this is happening. My task I think is to basically set very briefly a little bit of the historical context here and then I'm going to pass off to Eric Green who can tell you where we are right now in terms of the things that NIH has supported in this human microbiome project. And then that will sort of make it possible for all those speakers who follow over the next couple of days to go forward from that with exciting new ideas. That's exactly what I think the intention is of the meeting. My title here I thought about a bit and you could basically blame me for being a little hyperbolic here with all of these superlative supercharging and superorganism and not to mention the attempt at alliteration here. But it is a superorganism. We're talking about in terms of the interactions between host and microbes and the way in which we would like to see that move forward is to move that science in ever more powerful directions to understand how that works, how disruptions in that superorganism result in health and disease and what we could do about it. So very briefly in terms of the background, this certainly fits the mission of the NIH quite powerfully and compellingly. You may know NIH has this twofold mission of fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems, but also the application of that knowledge to extend healthy life and reduce illness and disability. Microbiome fits smack in the middle of this longstanding mission of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, the National Institutes of Health. Going back to sort of the historical side of this, you could say that microbiome was a very natural fit for NIH. Going back to our very original origins, many people aren't aware NIH was actually established a little over 125 years ago as a hygienic lab testing samples for infectious disease in a small laboratory not here in Bethesda at that point but on Staten Island. And over the course of time, of course, NIH are playing roles in many other ways that feed into what we're going to talk about as far as the microbiome, including as you can see the photograph here of Nirenberg, the genome project of course fitting in here. And interestingly, wondering where this genomic return to microbiology comes from and where the term microbiome first arose, it seems that it came forward in this article by Joshua Letterberg and Alexia McCray, Alexia is at the National Library of Medicine, where the formulation of words that begin in OM was put forward in a rather categorical and somewhat tongue-in-cheek way. But Letterberg very much, as you can imagine, having won the Nobel Prize for his own work in microbiology, was attracted to the term microbiome to signify the ecological community of commensal symbiotic and pathogenic microorganisms, pretty good definition, that literally share a body space and have all been ignored as determinants of health and disease. And here again, the term superorganism, we should think of each host and its parasites as a superorganism with respective genomes yoked into a chimera of sorts, well said, Josh. Of course, the ability to be able to sample the microbiome as we are now talking about dependant very much upon the ability to be able to collect nucleic acid information on organisms, many of which are not directly culturable. And so I'm sure much of today's conversation will relate to the fact that that has become within reach because of this curve. As you can see, and everybody who studies genomics is fond of showing curves like this, dropping the cost of a human genome from $100 million back in 2001 to now, as current estimates, exactly $5,671 are thereabouts. And of course, the technology to do that has advanced and that's why this has become possible from machines that look like this, some of which of course are still producing lots of data to things that are more micro-scaled, in this case an ion torrent, but there's lots of other competing technologies. And this has not anywhere near exhausted its potential for reducing costs and increasing throughput. And that has been such a phenomenal, wonderful ride to be on in the microbiome and of course, in lots of other applications as well. So how did microbiome become at NIH a project called the HMP and how did it find its way into support through what was at one point called the roadmap and then became the Common Fund? I asked Jane Peterson, who was engaged in the early days of this, to do a little walk through memory lane and remind me of sort of how this all got started. And she reminded me of a Valentine's Day evening meeting at NIH all of three hours, which a number of the people in the room were present for, where this idea of organizing an effort to focus on metagenomics, which ultimately I think we decided to prefer the term the microbiome project, might be a very timely thing to do, bring together investigators and sequencing capabilities and make this an effort which crosses institutes and therefore fit quite nicely into what was at that point called the roadmap and effort that Elias Sirhouni had put together and shortly after that became formalized because of congressional authorization into the Common Fund. All of that I think timely because here in 2006 it was beginning to become clear there was real potential here to apply the kind of DNA sequencing efforts that were becoming more and more achievable to do this kind of metagenomic analysis. So the argument then that this would fit nicely into the roadmap and ultimately the Common Fund was a pretty convincing one because the whole point of those kinds of means of supported NIH were to support projects as you see here that should be truly transforming that would require participation of NIH as a whole. No single institute or outside entity would be likely to do this on their own to place the outcomes in the public domain and again I'm glad to hear an Owen's description. That's something we have to keep pushing as this moves into other sources of support and needed development and incubator space to jump start the field because at that point it wasn't clear that the microbiome was going to move forward as swiftly as it might without that kind of incubator opportunity. And so this then was endorsed, brought forward fairly quickly as a Common Fund project. Lots of people worked hard on the effort to make that a reality. I particularly again want to mention Jane Peterson and Pam McGinnis both of whom put a huge amount of efforts into trying to organize this component of what the Common Fund was going to support and put together ideas about exactly what might happen, held various workshops, collected ideas from experts and interested parties of all sorts and then proposed a massive microbiome by standards of 2007, probably rather trivial by today, a massive microbial sequence project and then articles got written about what this might look like. This is a bunch of things from 2007 just as the effort was getting underway. A logo appeared, various diagrams about exactly how many more of them there are than of us which are part of all of our opening slides now when we talk about this got generated and we were off to the races. And of course this was not just a U.S. area of interest, the European interest had actually been there at least as early as the United States and so it was important to put together as much as possible the international efforts through this international human microbiome consortium with members and research programs that you see listed here and certainly going forward we want to be sure to take full advantage of all of those connections and collaborations. Well then I'm going to leave to Eric to describe a lot of what actually got done scientifically as a result of all this but as you know in the course of just a few years it was possible to produce really quite a remarkable foundation of data about the structure function and diversity of the healthy human microbiome, a framework for research and increasingly focus on specific disease areas where the microbiome seems to be playing a role, many of which are going to be discussed in much greater detail at this really important milestone meeting. And out of that I think be fair to say increasingly institutes that have been participating because everybody at NIH is involved in some way in a common fund project as either a participant or a cheerleader became increasingly clear that the way this direction was going would require institutes to actually embrace within their own portfolio some of the clinical applications and I want to just show you how that has come about because I think you'll be pleased to see the way in which the institutes are embracing this. This diagram for those of you who don't know the ins and outs of NIH just shows you the 27 institutes and centers at NIH that make up the way in which our budget is allocated and the way in which decisions are made about research priorities for the most part. The common fund is the exception but only represents a little less than 2% of the budget. The rest, the 98% is out here in these institutes. Before 2008 you can see a few of these institutes particularly NIGMS for instance and NIAID and a few others here NIDCR and invested in this but many of the others are not at that point now five years ago engaged in microbiome research support over the course of the next few years those numbers began to grow and now in 2013 you can see a very substantial fraction of the institutes are in fact engaged in supporting this recognizing the time has come to take the foundational information produced by the common fund supported enterprise and begin to see how that plays out in health and disease and that should be seen as good news if you try to factor that then into funding support. This graph shows you for 10, 11 and 12 what has happened both in terms of the number of grants and contracts which is in orange and the green which is the extramural funding which as you can see for FY 12 had climbed up to about 180 million dollars and the expectation is because the scientific opportunity is so compelling that that number provided that we don't get further hammered by additional budgetary distress ought to continue to grow. So I hope you'll see that as a sign of encouragement that we have begun to move into this phase of broad NIH interest and support for the areas that are represented at this meeting and that therefore it's a very timely moment to have the input from this kind of a group about how that's going and where it needs to go. Just have to mention that of course one of the aspects of this that feeds into another program that NIH is now putting some significant resources is of course the very large production of data that comes out of this kind of analysis particularly when it involves metagenomics and requires therefore some sophisticated analysis to know what's going on and we have recently in a group that I asked to look at our abilities to handle big data gotten the message that we have a lot of work to do here as a result of that NIH in a number of initiatives including one called BD2K big data to knowledge which was just announced this week focused on trying to build additional centers of excellence in computational approaches because clearly we're going to need that and the microbiome is just one example along with a variety of other approaches let's what's going on in cancer genomics the new brain initiative that's going to generate huge amounts of data from neuroscience and so on. I also have basically decided we need a key person that covers this issue across all of NIH and so we've established a new position called the associate director for data science very nice that the acronym there is ADDS isn't that cute and Eric Green who's going to speak in a minute is the acting ADDS and we're in the process of searching for a permanent person to take on that very important role and that's going to be very relevant I think to where microbiome needs to go because the data needs are going to be both interesting and pretty challenging. Well I think it's fair to say that the things we have already learned in terms of health and disease with the ability now to be able to sample the microbiome certainly in the GI tract but also in other areas like skin have told us already surprising things that would not have been predicted a few years ago about exactly how this super organism works and how things can go arrive and I suspect much more is still to come you have the feeling that we've just begun to scratch the surface and there's a lot of complexity here but it's beginning to look as if the fog is lifting and we're able to see some of the principles and some of the conclusions that might even become before long actionable and we'll hear about some of those at this meeting in fact so I just wanted to in a few moments there kind of set the stage of how we got to this point particularly to express to all of you how much NIH is excited about this area of science how it is one of those areas that we think has really arrived at the moment where it particularly was in need of nurturing as a foundational effort and is now bursting with potential that all of the institutes at NIH are interested in taking part in so congratulations again to the organizers of this effort we will look forward to seeing what comes out of this glad that there will be a report that can all be absorbed I'm glad that you're webcasting this so the people not in the room can also hear the presentations and it will stimulate I'm sure a lot of their thinking so many thanks to all of you have a great meeting it's a pleasure to be here thank you Dr. Collins for setting the tone and staying on time I appreciate that our next speaker is Dr. Eric Green I think he's already been introduced so come on up