 I know most of you, but I'm Rex Chisholm from Northwestern University, one of the co-chairs of this meeting. I'm actually really delighted to see everybody here pulling this meeting together. I think it came together at fairly short notice, as many of you know because you were asked to do something like three days ago, but it's really an effort to move forward. It's a very important strategic area for an HGRI, and obviously I think a very important strategic area for all of us in this room. This is actually a series of meetings. NHGRI organized a meeting in Chicago last June. I think many of you attended that. It was a terrific meeting. There was a lot of really good exchange of data, and I think probably the most important you're going to hear some detail, a detailed overview of that meeting in a few minutes. For those of you that didn't attend, and even for those of you that did, I think there was a lot of really great data sharing, and I think one of the things that came out of that was there is a lot of activity in this area of genomic medicine. We heard, and I'm sure Eric Green will expand on this when he makes his comments, but one of the interesting things that we heard at the NHGRI strategic planning retreat that ultimately led to the current strategic plan, I know Eric will mention that, was a meeting at Early House in I think July of last year, and that meeting was interesting because there was a fair amount of debate, a very vigorous and active debate about just whether or not genomics was ready for prime time. I think one of the messages all of us came away from the Chicago meeting was, it's definitely ready for prime time, and any of you that happened to turn on the news in the morning as you watch, you know, brushing your teeth or whatever, may have seen an ad that appeared this morning from a local healthcare organization that touted how genomics was going to be the future of medicine, and they were going to be the ones to apply it. So obviously it's now in the public domain in these places of, I don't know this healthcare organization, I won't disparage it at all, but one worries that there are people out there that are hyping genomics and genomic medicine, and so it's the group in this room that's really going to be the ones that make that happen and make it real, I think. So we need to take ownership and make sure it actually moves forward in a reasonable way rather than as a hype way. So this is the second in the series of meetings. This meeting has been funded by NHGRI, and then there will be a third meeting, we'll talk more about that later, May 3rd and 4th in Chicago, so there will be more activity along this. The goals for this meeting are to develop ideas for multi-center collaborative pilot projects in translational genomic medicine, and we've really organized the meeting around trying to get people together in groups so that you can hear about what kinds of projects are going on. All of these are projects by virtue of the fact that they're being presented that are open to other sites becoming involved or replicating at their local site. So the idea is we want to try to maximize these kinds of interactions and start to get some network sort of self-organizing. We want to learn about new projects that are ongoing at each of the sites represented in this room, and another important issue is we want to identify infrastructure needs and possible solutions to speed up the adoption of genomic medicine, and again NHGRI, together with the Welcome Trust, last week sponsored a meeting that at least several in the room were at. To look at one of those areas of infrastructure, which is databases, sort of what we're calling the ClinVar, ClinAction space, that was to look at database structures and how one goes about defining what a clinically valid or clinically actionable variant might be, and we're going to hear a summary of that meeting, which just happened Thursday and Friday from Mark Williams in a few minutes. And then we want to establish mechanisms for sharing of best practices among genomic centers, and there obviously one of those mechanisms are meetings like this, but there's been some discussion about whether we should have a more formal structure, and I think maybe we'll hear some more about that a bit later on in the meeting as well. So I wanted to make sure that we did this before we got too far. I wanted to also thank the people that made this meeting possible. Mark Graves from Northwestern and Ian Marperie from the NHGRI were really the folks that many of you interacted with, and we wouldn't be sitting here without their hard work, Simuli Maureen Smith from Northwestern and of course NHGRI for funding, and just so that you can see who to blame if this all falls apart. Here's the coordinating committee for the meeting. So more importantly, if you have any suggestions about what we should be doing at subsequent meetings in this series, any members of this group would be delighted to hear from you, and I'll call out Dan Rodin in particular because he's going to be one of the leaders for the next one that will happen in May. So sorry, Terry.