 Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for that kind gesture, Mark. And welcome especially to those who traveled, in some cases, from far away to join us at this important meeting. I thought I would just say a few things to set the context of what really has brought us here, and I can't help but just sort of think back on recognizing that when the Genome Project ended in 2003, NHGRI put together a strategic plan that sort of articulated a vision for what we thought was going to happen in genomics in the coming, you know, five to ten years. And I think it has caught all of us by surprise at the pace at which technological developments and strategic insights were gained in a fashion that allowed genomics to be thought about in a fashion that truly was going to be applied to medical care. And so the kind of imagery represented here, I think, has come onto the scene faster than any of us anticipated, and that's a good thing. So it was very timely that several years ago when we kicked off another strategic, and the reason we kicked off another strategic planning process was because of this acceleration in developments that had occurred faster than we really could have predicted. And so through a process of multiple meetings, workshops, websites, conference calls, et cetera, we did our usual collecting lots of information and got tremendous amounts of input in various areas, but the main message of this, of course, was that the time was absolutely here to be far more ambitious in trying to chart a course to apply genomics to medical care and to really see the realization of genomic medicine. And so, of course, I think many of you, all of you hopefully are familiar with the strategic plan that came out in the 10th anniversary issue of nature commemorating the 10th, the earlier publication of the draft sequence, the human genome. And if you want to know more, I'm not going to talk about the strategic plan or the strategic planning process. We have a website that details much of it and catalogs all the details if you're interested. Of course, the organizing aspect of this entire strategic plan is now built around a framework that is portrayed in Figure 2 of that strategic plan, and the most important aspect of it is these five domains of research activity across the top, which sort of chart a course from the more basic side of activities of understanding how genomes are put together to understanding how they work, but most importantly, especially for this kind of workshop, then learning about disease, genetic variants that underlie disease, and then using that information to advance the science of medicine and eventually improve healthcare. And much of these activities towards the right are in fact all practically towards the right size figure are new for NHGRI and in many ways new to the field of genomics, and that's where the challenge becomes. Now the thing, of course, that is driving this, if you ask me what is the one thing that drives this strategic vision, this figure, much of what NHGRI is thinking about, I think the field of genomics is thinking about, of course, it is this due to this remarkable technological advances that have yielded rapid reductions in the cost of genome sequencing, and with that are coming studies that previously were unimaginable, but now are absolutely right here on our doorstep. In fact, in the case of NHGRI, we have a, as you know, a large-scale sequencing program, and that this year is the year we are in the process of renewing that, and we have, we will soon be describing or announcing sort of the results of that renewal process, but importantly, as we put out the program, or the RFA's describing this, it was, again, part of a planning process that led us, and our advisory process that led us to sort of seeing opportunities that we wanted to catalyze that would, again, start to bring genome sequencing closer and closer to the bedside, and as you will hear about in the coming days, indeed, we will be doing exactly that in the kind of sequencing program that we will now be leading over the next four or five years. What I will tell you for NHGRI's sequencing program, and I guarantee it is mirrored by other funding agencies, certainly the Wellcome Trust, the Sanger Institute, and others, is it is going to be ambitious and audacious, as always, but with these kinds of reductions in genome sequencing, we're going to be sequencing not thousands of individuals. In fact, I think we're going to be sequencing not tens of thousands of individuals, but in reality, we're going to be sequencing hundreds of thousands of individuals, and with that, and much of that, although not all, but much that is going to be part of clinical research studies at major medical centers and research hospitals around the world, as we try to chart a course that will eventually get us closer and closer to using that kind of information as part of medical care. And that's the challenge that lies before us. Finally, if you want to know a little bit more about some of our thinking coming out of NHGRI, about some of these more clinical applications extending beyond our strategic plan, Terry Minolio and I recently were asked to write a commentary that was published earlier this year in Cell, and it's just shown there that describes a little bit more how we see how the clinical impact coming out of these basic discoveries and genomics are going to come to pass. So with all that genome sequence data being generated increasingly around clinical research studies, what we heard, anticipating that, loud and clear, where there were a number of things that needed to be done, and what we heard during the strategic planning process were several things that we actually, I referred to as no-brainers, things we absolutely needed to move on as soon as the strategic plan was published and we wanted to act on. And we actually laid those out in one of our text boxes. We called it Imperatives for Genomic Medicine, the slang for it, I use, or no-brainers. And one of those no-brainers is right there. It's about the fourth or so it went down, where we talked about, and because we heard loud and clear the need for practical systems for clinical genomics informatics. And we needed new models for capturing and displaying these variants and their phenotypic consequences. These need to be developed and incorporated into practical systems that make information available to patients and their healthcare providers. And that very much reflected language we heard over and over again during the strategic planning process. And I will tell you we continue to hear over and over again at workshops, conference calls, various ways we're interacting with individuals, even since the strategic plan came out in February. Now, this is new territory for us. It's sort of out here thinking about these rightward domains, the more clinically oriented ones. But we are prepared now to start planting the seeds that will, especially to start the process that when the coming decade will yield the kinds of clinical genomic informatics systems that will be practical, will be robust, and will be exactly what the community is asking for. And so the reason we are here is to have you advise us and others, such as the Welcome Trust, about the creation of such clinical genomic information systems. We recognize these are highly interrelated with electronic health records, highly interrelated with the development of appropriate tools that healthcare professionals are going to be able to use routinely as part of clinical care. And all this gets very complicated very quick, but it's exactly the reason why we wanted to convene a group of very smart people, such as all of you, to help give us and others advice. So that is the purpose of this workshop. I want to really stress that this workshop is very much a collaboration between NHGRI on behalf of NIH, and by the way, it won't just be NHGRI and NIH, and we have multiple representatives from other institutes. Because obviously this is an issue that affects many different institutes, and I'm quite certain, and we already know that we will be heavily in working with other NIH institutes as we move forward in this area. But we also recognize this is like many things in genomics, would be best handled dealing with other types of collaboration, such as the Wellcome Trust. And we appreciate their co-sponsorship and support for this workshop as well. The goal is to consider processes, databases, and other resources needed to identify clinically relevant variants, to decide whether they are actionable and for what action they should be, and to provide information for clinical use. So all that sounds simple. You can reduce it to one slide. I'm quite sure we're going to be really having to put our heads together to think about the best blueprint to develop for that over the next couple of days. So that's what I wanted to say as an overview. What I want to just tell you a few more logistical things, I want to be the one to immediately thank a number of people on the planning committee who have put in a tremendous amount of work. In particular, I should start by saying thanking Rex Chisholm and Mark Williams who are co-chairs of this planning committee, and the membership of which is here, and I know it's also printed in your book. But I should also give a special thanks to Aaron Ramos, who's really been the NHGRI staff member who has just led the charge in keeping all this coordinated and worried about every last little detail. And she's made the promise to me that if this meeting goes well, she won't have her baby because that baby's due anytime. But if discussions start going in a bad way, she's going to start to pretend like she's going into labor to get them back on track. So in any case, but Aaron has just been a hero in this, and all of us should make sure to stop by at some point and thank her because these meetings are not easy to put together. And she's been just terrific at doing that. And the last logistical thing I wanted to say is that we are videotaping this. You'll see a camera back there. We are videotaping this, and it's not being videocast live, but we are planning. There's a lot of interest in this meeting, a lot of interest in this topic. And so we are going to videotape this, and then we will be posting this in the coming weeks and days on our website. So for people who can't be here or might be interested in hearing some of the talks in particular, you'll be able to point them to that. And you'll be able to find it on our website, and we can send around the information when it is available. So I will stop there, and again, thank you all for coming. I enjoy hearing about this for the next couple of days. And with that, I'm going to turn this over to Tim Hubbard of the Sanger, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who's going to also add his own introductory remarks and comments, and again, I really want to stress, this meeting is very much a partnership between NIH and the Wellcome Trust. Tim. Thank you. OK, so I guess I want to welcome you on behalf of the Wellcome Trust and try and get out of...