 The Human Genome Project was launched 27 years ago. It took 13 years and 3 billion dollars in the activities of hundreds of scientists to sequence just one genome, the human genome. And what are genomes and what do they mean to us? A great metaphor for a genome is like a book, a book of life. The genome encodes all of the instructions to make an organism. A genome can tell us about the past, can inform us of our ancestry. It can tell us about the present, it can tell us the kinds of traits we have and it can tell us something about the future in terms of prediction of risk for developing specific diseases. But science tells us that we now have an entirely new field of medicine that is the result of the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project has transformed our fundamental understanding of human biology and it has also led to this new field of precision medicine where treatments can be designed for treating specific diseases on the basis of one's own genotype. But not only is the Human Genome Project and precision medicine saving lives every day, the Human Genome Project unleashed an entire wave of innovation. And for the 3 billion dollars that were invested in the Human Genome Project, one study by Battelle estimated that 1 trillion dollars in economic activity has been returned to the U.S. economy and that's just for a single organism. Right now science is telling us that we only know of about 10% of the species on our planet and that doesn't include the billions of microbes, small organisms that we can't see but that form the underpinnings of all ecosystems on the planet. What we're talking about here, the 10%, are the 10 to 15 million species that are estimated to populate our planet. But of these 10 to 15 million, only a small fraction, as I mentioned, about 1.5 to 2 million are known. These relatively small number to the total biodiversity has given us our entire picture of what we understand about modern biology and also all the tools that we use for food production and other bio-dependent industries. So from the 2 million, we have about 316,000 species of plants and from those 316,000 species, numerous drugs have been developed. For example, taxol, a very important drug in treating cancer, is derived from a small tree and from the oceans, the invertebrates, the mollusks, the snails and the sponges. Many, many new drugs have been identified for treating pain and chronic diseases such as cancer. For example, the drug Ciderabine, which is used to treat human leukemia, was first isolated from a sponge. Now, take those 1.5 to 2 million species that are known and if you look at how many of their genomes have been sequenced, only 15,000 species on the planet have some knowledge of their genomes and of those, only 2,500 have been sequenced to completion. 2,500 species, this represents less than a tenth of a percent of all the eukaryotic biodiversity on the planet. Well, what about the other 99.9 percent? What is hidden in the 3.5 billion years of evolution of life on our planet? Well, if you look at the technology, the technology has become cheaper and cheaper. The cost of DNA sequencing has come down nearly a million fold. What took $3 billion to sequence back in 1997 through 2003 now costs less than $1,000. And with sequencing costs that low, we now have access then, the ability to understand and study the dark matter of biology. Those million and a half species that we have relatively no sequence information and in addition to those, in addition to those, the 13 and a half million species for which we have not even yet laid our hands on. Now, all of that raises the question as to whether we are now at the doorstep of another revolution, the fifth industrial revolution which will be enabled by biology. And this enormous opportunity has led us to propose a group of scientists including myself and others from the Smithsonian Institution the University of Illinois and several prominent institutions around the world to propose what we're calling a moonshot for biology. To sequence the DNA of all eukaryotic life on Earth in a 10-year period. A great grand challenge. And we call this project the Earth Biogenome Project. The goals of the project are to maximize returns to society and human welfare, to enable the conservation, protection and restoration of biodiversity, and to reinvigorate our understanding of biology, of ecosystems, and of evolutionary processes. Let's just take a few examples for improving human welfare. New ecosystem services will be created. New biological synthetic fuels, new biomaterials, new food for feeding a growing human population, new drugs for slowing or reversing the aging process, and new treatments for infectious and inherited diseases. Biodiversity. It is very clear that we are now entering what has been called the sixth mass extinction of life on our planet. 52% we have reduced in the last 40 years the vertebrate population size has been reduced by 52%. 23,000 of the 80,000 species surveyed by the International Union for the conservation of nature are threatened with extinction. Scientists believe that by the end of the century more than half of all species will be vanished from the face of the Earth and with consequences to human life on Earth that are unknown but are potentially catastrophic. And finally reinvigorating our understanding of our ecosystems, evolution and ecology through understanding, a greater understanding of the relationships between all life forms on the planet. This is going to require innovation. Innovation at several levels just like the human genome project unleashed. Innovation such as portable sequencers rather than bringing DNA to the lab to bring the sequencer to the sample. Autonomous vehicles, one of the greatest challenges of the project is collecting a million and a half samples. We envision drone technology, instrumented drones that can go out, identify samples in the field and bring those samples back to the laboratory or process them on site for species identification. And all of these technologies are going to be necessary for the sequencing and interpreting of a million and a half genomes. And a significant new challenge for this project will be in the area of computing. New algorithms are necessary for analyzing and visualizing the enormous amount of data that will be generated by this project. We anticipate this project will generate at least an exabyte of data. Thousands of petabytes of data generated each year. That's 2,000 times more than is generated, for example, by Twitter. And more than any other scientific source of data including the land-based telescopes for astronomy. Soon we're going to be referring to huge amounts of data, not as astronomical amounts of data, but as genomical amounts of data. And from this, all of these data, we aim to create a new digital repository of life reflecting the wisdom of 3.5 billion years of evolution of life on our planet. So, the Human Genome Project has certainly contributed much to our understanding of biology. But sequencing all of eukaryotic life will contribute much, much more than what we have learned from a single species. Can it be done? Yes, it can be done with existing technology. The technology exists today to do this. And we can do it at a cost of about 4.7 billion dollars. If we convert the cost of 3 billion dollars to today's dollars, that means that the cost of sequencing all eukaryotic life on Earth will be less than the cost of sequencing what it took to sequence the human genome. This is absolutely amazing, if you think about it, all due to the progress in technology. And this has begun. The work has begun. BGI in China is committed to sequencing 10,000 plant genomes. The University of California Davis in collaboration with the Broad Institute in Massachusetts is sequencing 200 mammals. The Rockefeller University in New York is in the process with their vertebrate genomes project of sequencing all 66,000 vertebrates, birds, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. And many other countries and many other institutions such as our main partner institution, the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C. And that brings us to our partnership with the Earth Bank of Codes. For countries to participate in this initiative, in this grand project, they have to know that their biodiversity and the intellectual property derived from their biodiversity will be protected, that the benefits will be equitably shared. And the partnership that we are announcing today at the World Economic Forum here in Davos with the Earth Bank of Codes is designed to do exactly that. The first project will be a test project in the Amazon where we will focus on mapping and sequencing all of the hundreds of thousands of species. In fact, Brazil has 10% of the total of the world's biodiversity just exists in one country. If we're successful in Brazil, in the Amazon, this will serve as a foundation for other countries with rich biodiversity to join this amazing project, a project that will result in the sequencing of all of life on our planet. Thank you very much.