 I'm going to talk a little bit about what the White House Office of Science and Technology policy is and what we do, what kind of tools we have at our disposal. And then I'll talk about two distinct frameworks that I put on the table as ways that we think about science and science policy and ways that you might be able to, as a collective, consider or organize microbiota research. And I also want to say after Dr. Realman's talk, I think maybe I had a misuse of terminology here so I apologize. I should say human microbiota research. All right, so the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is one of a handful of policy councils in the White House and we have three main missions. The first is to make sure that the president and his senior staff are properly informed about the science and technology components of all matters that come across their desks. The second is to ensure that the policies broadly of the executive branch are informed by sound science. And then the third is to ensure that the scientific and technical work of the executive branch is properly coordinated so as to provide the greatest benefit to society. We have a handful of tools that we use in order to achieve those missions. The first is that we can help to put out statements of national policy which can come in a variety of different forms. Executive orders, presidential policy directives, agenda-setting documents that go to the executive branch agencies. The second is that we help the president coordinate his budget so we work closely with all of the agency leadership and with the Office of Management and Budget to make sure that the budget is in line with the president's stated priorities. We can work with Congress and we sometimes work with Congress on legislation. We also help to contribute to presidential events and speeches. So when the president is out there talking about science, which he really likes to do because he is a very strong believer in the importance of science, you know, those are opportunities for us to contribute. And then finally, and this is something that I will put on the table today, is an ability to convene. So we do have the ability to bring together partnerships that might be difficult to establish in other settings, whether they're public-private partnerships, public partnerships, whatever. And so one of the questions that we are asked to think about is if you could call anyone, who would you call and what would you ask for? Okay, so something that the president is very excited about is what are the grand challenges for the 21st century. We all are familiar with the concept of grand challenges, the mission of getting a man to the moon that President Kennedy called for in the 1960s is a great example. The Human Genome Project is another one. More recently, we've seen other decentralized, non-government-organized types of grand challenges such as the establishment of Wikipedia, you know, putting all of the world's knowledge online where anybody can access it. It's important to think a little bit about what the attributes of a grand challenge are. So this is how we define what a grand challenge is. It should have some type of significant, identifiable impact in an area of national and global priority. It should be ambitious, yet achievable, and compelling, motivating, and able to capture the public's imagination. And it's very important that it has this Goldilocks level of specificity. So you should be able to clearly define what it is that you are trying to accomplish in the grand challenge. And then, of course, because I come from the Office of Science and Technology Policy and because I am a scientist, you know, we think that the grand challenges that we are interested in should be able to harness innovation and science and technology. So this is a newly launched web page that we have from the White House website. And it talks about the president's call to the public to identify and support the 21st Century grand challenges. I apologize for the difficulty in reading the text here. Hopefully you all can read the link there and I'm happy to provide it afterwards. But at the bottom, you'll notice that there are four images. And these are some examples of grand challenges that federal agencies are actually promoting and supporting right now. So the one on the left is NIH DARPA and NSF's Brain Initiative, which Dr. Collins mentioned earlier today and which the president launched with Dr. Collins at his side in April. The next is DOE has two grand challenges, EV Everywhere, which is aiming to make the electric vehicles as affordable as today's gasoline-powered vehicles within 10 years. And they have a SunShot grand challenge, which is trying to do the same with photovoltaic power, making it cost competitive with coal-powered energy. And then there's NASA's Asteroid Challenge and the USAID has a whole suite of grand challenges around global development. So one question that I would pose to this group to think about over the next few days is, can you identify and articulate a grand challenge for human microbiota research? And there are implications across many administration and I would say probably national and social priorities. Food safety, nutrition and health and agriculture are some that come to mind. And someone earlier had talked about, I think it was the previous speaker, encouraging our children to eat dirt, which is not what I'm doing with this picture, but I thought it was a great picture from the New York Times magazine article that was out earlier this year. Okay, so another separate framework for thinking about opportunities in microbiota research are platform technologies. Now, the NRC published a new biology report in 2009. And in that, they described the recent technological advances in a bunch of fields outside of the life sciences that are contributing to analysis.