 Okay, Eric, I think I'll turn it back to you for the director's report then. Okay, thank you, Rudy. And again, welcome to our guests on council today and future council members come February. So as Rudy mentioned and reminded you, the open session of this meeting of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research is being webcast live. And as is now our routine, the open session of all council meetings are videotaped and then they're made available as a permanent archive on our website. And that includes both the presentations as well as the associated documents. And relevant to that, in particular for folks who are new to the council meeting, I want to make you aware there's an electronic resource associated with my director's report that's analogous to a supplemental materials that's often made available with published papers and you can access it at the URL shown here. And the slides that I'm showing in this director's report are also made available electronically both as PDF files but also as the real PowerPoint file. And for slides that are associated with specific documents or relevant websites, I have a document number indicated in the bottom right of the slide that references materials that can be accessed at this website. In addition to the video archive I just mentioned, this webpage and all the link documents will be archived on NHGRI's website, genome.gov as a permanent historic resource. Now there'll be other presentations during the open session of this council meeting. My director's report is specifically tailored around these presentations so that I won't discuss in detail the topics that others will be covering later. Among those presentations will be one from one of our council members, Artie Ride, regarding the recent Supreme Court decision on Gene Patton's. Then after lunch today, Kathy Hudson, who's the NIH Deputy Director for Science Outreach and Policy, will join us to discuss the recent developments related to the generated HeLa cell line genome sequence and data-sharing implications for this for future genomic studies that use HeLa cells. And then Terry Minolio will later give us an update on the activities of the Genomic Medicine Working Group. There'll also be three project updates today. One from Vence Bonham about the NHGRI Smithsonian Genome exhibition. One from Vivian Benaza about the NHGRI Bioinformatics Research Portfolio. And then one from Heather Junkins about the NHGRI Training and Career Development Program. So what I'm going to do now in my director's report is to cover these seven topics, one by one. And together we find these represent sort of a good framework for reviewing the relevant material since the last council meeting. And we'll begin with some general NHGRI updates. Well, without question, the biggest NHGRI highlight since the last council meeting was the opening of the NHGRI Smithsonian exhibition, Genome Unlocking Lives Code. In a remarkable two short years, we went from conception to design to grand opening, this wonderful partnership between NHGRI and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. And it has produced a truly spectacular exhibition in my very humble opinion. I'm hoping that council members will be seen in person tomorrow morning. You'll be getting a more detailed update about the exhibition and its associated programming in particular from Vence Bonham later today. But let me just briefly mention a few quick highlights. The exhibition opened formally on June 14th. The day before that official opening, NHGRI and the Smithsonian Communications Office has held a press event that was attended by representatives from local and national press outlets, which helped generate a very positive set of reviews about the exhibition that Vence is going to tell you about. And then that evening, the Smithsonian and the Foundation for NIH hosted an opening event that featured remarks and presentations by Smithsonian Secretary Dr. Wayne Clough, National Museum of Natural History Director Kirk Johnson that some of you will probably meet tomorrow morning, and then yours truly. But then there was a very special video message prepared just for the opening by former President Bill Clinton, who's a huge genomics fan, and finally a keynote presentation by Francis Collins. And this was then followed by a wonderful reception in the museum's rotunda for the more than 500 guests, who then had the opportunity to be the first to see the exhibition. Now in the next year, while resident at the Smithsonian in D.C., and then in the following four to five years while it travels across North America, literally millions of visitors will get to see this exhibition. Among those have already been some special VIP guests who have gotten private tours. For example, in July, Kirk Johnson, Vence Bonham and I gave a private tour of the exhibition to Representative Louise Slaughter. You may recall that Congresswoman Slaughter was a sponsor and great champion of the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, Gina, so she was thrilled to see what we had produced to help improve the nation's genomics literacy. But Congresswoman had a chance to explore the exhibition, to learn from the interactives, and as you can see in the bottom middle photograph, even isolate her own DNA. Now then, in August, Francis Collins, along with Vence Bonham and Laura Rodriguez of NHGRI, gave a private tour of the exhibition to two cabinet secretaries. Kathleen Sibelius, the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, and Janet Napolitano, who was then, but no longer is, but was then the Department of Homeland Security Secretary. These two secretaries and some of their staff thoroughly enjoy the exhibition, again, including purifying their own DNA, which probably hasn't been done by very many cabinet secretaries in the history of the United States. And I can assure you that this will not be the end of such private tours for VIPs, with several others either scheduled or soon to be scheduled. The exhibition is truly turning out to be an ideal venue to share the excitement about genomics with colleagues, political leaders, especially in the D.C. area, and key members of the general public. But besides these VIPs, I can tell you that many people have already visited the exhibition. In fact, last week I was informed that the Smithsonian estimated that we passed the one million mark to the exhibition last week, with roughly 38 percent of the visitors to the museum this summer saying by polling, they stopped by to see the genome exhibition, and therefore were probably over a diameter moment as we probably passed the million mark. So these are just the highlights about the exhibition, and you'll be hearing more about it from Vince Bonham later today. So moving on, as many of you know, we co-sponsor a policy fellowship with the American Society of Human Genetics. The program was started in 2002, and last month we welcomed our 12th fellow, Kate Donaghan. Kate comes to us having completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. We're working on a variety of policy issues in the NHGRI Division of Policy Communications and Education for the next several months, after which she will progress to the next stage of her fellowship in a to be determined congressional office. As an aside, we have been pleased with our many-year collaboration with the American Society for Human Genetics with the Science Policy Fellowship Program, and that we are now starting to explore with the society the possible, in fact, likely establishment of a joint science education fellowship, and I'll have more to say about that at a later date. In terms of departures, Brad Ozenberger has left NHGRI to take a research faculty position at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. As many of you know, Brad was a program director on our extramural research program for about 10 years, was a major leader of the TCGA program, and recently took on the position of Deputy Director of the Division of Genomic Medicine. His last day with us, in fact, was last Friday, and we wish Brad all the best in his new position at Washington University. Other personnel updates relate to some important ongoing NHGRI recruitments. As you can hear from the introductions, we have a bunch of new staff as Rudy introduced, but we also have a number of ongoing recruitments. The search to identify a director for the Division of Genomics of Society, one of the four divisions that constitutes NHGRI's extramural research program, has progressed considerably since the last council meeting. In brief, we reached a very advanced stage in that search process, and I'm hopeful that I'll be able to name a director for this division well before the next council meeting in February. I'll recall that NHGRI Deputy Director Mark Geyer is serving as the acting director of this division until I appoint a permanent director. A related future recruitment, which is also now progressing, will involve the appointment of another program director for our ELSI research program. And in addition, we are hard at work at evaluating existing candidates and soliciting additional applications for two open program director positions in the general area of bioinformatics and computational biology, individuals who will work again in our extramural research program. And finally, we're about to relaunch our efforts to identify someone to serve as Chief of the Genomics Healthcare Branch within our Division of Policy Communications and Education. So as you can see, NHGRI is a number of key positions for which we have important ongoing recruitments if council members have any ideas of possible individuals, especially for the last three categories, we would certainly be very receptive to hear from you. In terms of honors for our existing staff, Vivian Oda Wang of NHGRI's extramural research program has been awarded the American Psychological Association Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, Charles and Shirley Thomas Award. This award was created by the APA to honor the significant contributions made by Charles and Shirley Thomas in the area of student mentoring and development. So congratulations to Vivian. Those are my NHGRI updates. Moving to NIH updates. As I mentioned in May, John Lorsch was selected to be the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at NIGMS, and John officially started in his position last month. Now as expected, John and I have already been working hard to explore how NHGRI and NIGMS can interact more substantially in the future, since one can readily envision major areas of synergy between our two institutes. And in fact, we just decided, literally like last week, that we're going to hold a day-long retreat involving the extramural program staffs at both institutes in the coming months, and I fully expect that we'll have more things to say about future interactions between the two institutes at the February Council meeting. Besides visiting our genome exhibition at the Smithsonian, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius also visited the NIH last month. She toured a number of NIH facilities, and she spoke at an all-NIH town hall. In addition, I was fortunate to be included in a meeting that she held with a small group of institute and center directors, as shown in the photograph on the bottom right. During that meeting, she offered her admiration of the good work that NIH scientists and grantees do, and spoke quite candidly, actually, about the negative effects of sequestration on the biomedical research enterprise. NHGRI staff also got to participate in three visits of congressional members to the NIH campus during the summer. In June, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada visited the Clinical Center, and then representatives Michael Burgess of Texas and Scott Peters of California both visited in one very busy week in July. During all three of these visits, the congressmen met with pediatric patients and families enrolled in the Undiagnosed Diseases Program. They met with NHGRI staff, among others, and they were impressed by the commitment with NHGRI, the commitment of the NIH researchers and doctors that they met. I had the chance to meet with the two representatives and was able to discuss advances in genomics in quite a substantial way with each of them. Majority Leader Reid was so impressed that shortly after his visit to NIH, he gave a speech on the Senate floor about the value of research like the Undiagnosed Diseases Program and the negative effects of sequestration cuts on biomedical research, and I included here a quote that he gave in that speech talking about his reaction to seeing what was going on in the NIH Clinical Center. And then those remarks of Senator Reid could not have been better time because also in June, Representative Louise Slaughter and Senator Tom Harkin, along with the ad hoc group for medical research, sponsored a briefing on Capitol Hill to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project. Francis Collins and I were invited to present on both the history of the Human Genome Project and how advances in DNA sequencing technologies have led to plummeting costs for genome sequencing and were enabling impressive research and clinical advances. The event was actually quite well attended and you can see from the photograph, literally, was standing room only. A number of people came and were quite engaged throughout the entire event. In other political news, Regina Benjamin has stepped down as the U.S. Surgeon General. Deputy Surgeon General Boris Lushniak will serve as the acting Surgeon General until the more permanent Surgeon General is appointed. In terms of nominations, President Obama has nominated France Cordova to serve as the next director of the National Science Foundation. Among other things, she is currently chair of the main governing board for the Smithsonian Institution and in fact, Vence Bonham actually gave her a private tour of the genome exhibition shortly before she was nominated for the NSF directorship. And then at the same time that the President announced the nominee, his nominee for the NSF director, he also announced a series of other nominations, one of which was a nomination of Yale University microbiologist, Joe Handelsman to be the next associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy or OSTP. Joe would succeed Carl Weinman who was a physics Nobel laureate who stepped down in June 2012 for health reasons. Joan is known to many of us at NHGRI both for her research in microbiome, but also she's currently PI on Yale's T32 training grant from our institute. So we look forward to working with Joe when she assumes her new position. And now onto our super fun topic appropriations and budget. Well, when it comes to appropriations it never seems to be a simple story. We are a mere three weeks away from the start of a new fiscal year in October 1 but we truly have no idea what NHGRI's budget will likely be in fiscal year 2014. Congress has yet to pass an appropriations bill to fund the NIH for the upcoming year and it's highly unlikely that they will meet the end of September deadline for doing so. So the regular appropriations process will not be completed. Given this reality, Congress is now negotiating about the passage of a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown on October 1. Such a CR is anticipated. Now there has been some congressional action on establishing NIH funding for fiscal year 2014. In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed a bill that allocates nearly $31 billion to NIH including $514 million for NHGRI that's shown in the far right of this table. Note that these figures are slightly lower than the President's budget shown in the third column from the left. And although this would represent a 6% increase for NHGRI compared to fiscal year 2013, our current fiscal year it's only the case because the sequester reduced NHGRI's budget to $483 million this year. So a $514 million budget would essentially be flat compared to what NHGRI's fiscal year 2012 budget was at a time when our budget was $512 million. Now notably the Senate Committee's bill has yet to be considered by the full Senate and the House Appropriations Committee has yet to issue draft legislation at all for fiscal year 2014. So in short, probably the only thing that we can be certain about is continued uncertainty regarding funding levels for NIH and NHGRI. We were asked recently to submit a listing of the major consequences of the sequester on NHGRI's research programs and told we could talk quite openly about these. So I thought I would share with you the casualty list to give you a flavor of the overall damage caused by the sequester. In short, this year's sequester and budgetary reduction forced NHGRI to do the following things listed on this slide. Our bioinformatics resources analysis research portfolio reduced by $5 million. Our encode RFA that you gave us good input about was reduced by 16%. An RFA on genomics and gene regulation was delayed from fiscal 2012 to 2014. Our genomics sequencing and newborn screening disorders RFA was reduced by 50%. Our genomic medicine pilot demonstration project RFA reduced by 20%. And I can tell you on our intramural research program there were numerous examples of detrimental cuts that really were harmful to the program. So that's the casualty list for NHGRI. Now while we're at making lists I should also point out that we should consider what it does to trans-NIH initiatives such as the big data to knowledge or BD2K initiative that I'll talk about later in my director's report. And once again, the consequences were all negative. We have a data catalog we're going to do with how to reduce the amount for fiscal 2014. A framework for community based development of data and metadata standards reduced in fiscal 2014. Our training initiative for BD2K deferred until 2015. A software RFA deferred until 2015. And our BD2K NIH initiated centers RFA deferred into this NIH initiated centers has been now deferred until fiscal 2015. So you get a flavor but I wanted to sort of trot these out for you so you see in real terms what the casualty has been both for NHGRI and for trans-NIH initiatives with the sequestration. Okay, let's look for some cheerier notes by moving on to some general genomics updates. Well an innovative policy solution for accessing HeLa cell line derived whole genome data was announced by NIH in early August. You'll recall that in March a whole genome sequence of the HeLa cell line was posted in open access data repositories upon publication of a paper analyzing the data that came out in the journal G3. When the LACS family learned of this they asked for the data to be removed from those repositories which it probably was. Well when NIH became aware of the situation the agency felt that it was important to work with the LACS family to identify an appropriate path forward for research and for the family. One story of this cell line including the lack of informed consent from Henrietta Lacks the widespread use of the cells and the substantive publicity associated with the identity of the family presented a rather unique but important moment for research policy development. Well to tell you more about this story and how it unfolded we invited Kathy Hudson to come here this afternoon to talk about the discussions with the family and the ultimate policy that was developed for accessing HeLa whole genome data. So you'll hear more about that later today. A number of scientists received the open science champions of change honor at the White House in June. The group included some familiar figures to NHGRI, a tool of boot, David Alstuhler, David Lipman, Stephen Friend, John Quackenbush. The champions of change program was launched as part of President Obama's Winning the Future initiative which highlights individuals, businesses, and organizations who make positive impacts on communities. This group of investigators and entrepreneurs are being singled out for their efforts to make open sharing of scientific data reality. A goal that the Obama administration has promoted as a priority for enabling and enhancing scientific innovation. Other honors in the NHGRI areas of interest, David Botstein of Princeton University and Ron Davis and David Hognis both of Stanford University are the recipients of the 2013 Warren Albert Foundation Prize for their seminal contributions to concepts and methods of creating a human genetic map and of positional cloning leading to the identification of thousands of human disease genes and ushering the major advances in human genetics. Also Professor Sir Mike Stratton, director of the Welcome Trust Sanger Institute was recently knighted for services to medical research. The knighthood was awarded in recognition of his research into the genetic causes of human cancers. Mike's laboratory was the BRCA2 cancer gene and founded the Cancer Genome Project at the Sanger Institute. Jennifer Puck, UCSF Professor and former branch chief and senior investigator in the NHGRI Intramural Research Program received the 2013 Abbott Award in Clinical and Diagnostic Immunology for her work on primary immunodeficiencies. Bob, please give Jennifer our congratulations from NHGRI. Charles Lee has been appointed the founding director of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine. Charles is best known for his discovery that copy number variation is widespread and significant in the human genome. In his new role, he will be responsible for the scientific direction of the Jackson Laboratory of Genomic Medicine, which is being created in Farmington, Connecticut. Earlier this summer, there was a major announcement about the formation of an international global alliance that will enable secure sharing of genomic and clinical data. And shown here are the press releases about the global alliance that came from the Broad Institute and the Sanger Institute. Now, the global alliance has many aims, including establishing interoperable standards for genomic and clinical data, and developing a framework for harmonizing data sharing practices to address issues related to ethics, privacy, and consent. Now, at the time of the announcement this summer, they had obtained signatures to their letter of intent from over 73 institutions that included NIH, but also NHGRI and NCI, and that those signatures came from institutions in 40 countries. And in total, this included more than 13 funding agencies that have signed on to the principles. Now, there is notable overlap in some of the aims and components of NIH's BD2K initiative, so this seems to be a great opportunity for synergy between these initiatives. And we are in conversations with the key leaders of the global alliance as they get their efforts off the ground, and I expect we'll have more information to report to Council in the coming months as things develop. UK's Health Minister Jeremy Hunt has launched Genomics England, a new government organization to oversee the creation of a genomic revolution in healthcare that will attract business investment. It will be led by Sir John Chisholm, a former chair of the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom. Recall that in May of 2011, the Battelle Technology Partnership practice published a report that basically laid out data showing that for every dollar a federal investment in genomics research, roughly $141 were created in the wider economy. It's actually a statistic that was quoted by President Obama in his 2013 State of the Union address. Now, the Battelle Group released an update to the report this past June, and the results were even more impressive. Between 1988 and 2012, the federal government invested $14.5 billion in 2012 dollars in genomics. This generated an economic output of nearly a trillion dollars over the same timeframe, creating more than 4.3 million job years of employment. When one realizes that the U.S. government invested $3.8 billion in the Human Genome Project, that works out to be a return on investment of about 178 to 1. Shown here is a photograph taken at the United for Medical Research briefing in June on Capitol Hill where the updated Battelle report was announced. Among the briefing participants were myself, Adahamish, Francis Collins, California Representative Scott Peters, who I showed you earlier who visited NIH, he's on the far right in this photograph, and also Life Technology CEO, Greg Usier, who is in the second from the right. And then in May of this year, the McKinsey Global Institute, a research firm of the management consultancy group McKinsey & Company, released a report entitled Disruptive Technologies, Advances That Will Transform Life Business in the Global Economy. It is notable that, quote, next generation genomics, end of quote, was listed as one of the 12 technologies with profound disruptive potential. The other technologies that were grouped with next generation genomics were impressive and included things like mobile internet, cloud technology, advanced robotics, 3D printing, and renewable energy. Now, while the report has some gaps and it even has some debatable predictions, I just think it's another interesting example of the growing awareness of genomics and its significance to a wide array of interests, including biotech, medicine, agriculture, and energy. The long-running legal battle over myriad genetics BRCA1 gene patent, which began in 2009, reached its inclusion of June 13th this year when the U.S. Supreme Court released their unanimous opinion deciding that isolated but otherwise unmodified human genes are products of nature and therefore not patent-eligible subject matter. You'll be hearing much more about this topic in a much more sophisticated way than I could do from Councilmember Arti Rai, but I would just note that the Court's decision written by Justice Thomas follows closely the U.S. government's position, which NHGRI helped to develop. Well, it's been five years since the Genetic Information Non-Discrimination Act, or GINA, was passed and signed into law. NHGRI has been monitoring its implementation by the courts, and as you might know, GINA tasked the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC, with protecting workers from genetic discrimination in the workplace. Well, in May, the Commission announced the settlement of the first lawsuit it had filed for a GINA violation and also the filing of a second suit. Both cases allege that the employer illegally included questions about family medical histories during pre-employment medical exams, and under GINA, it is illegal for companies to ask their employees for genetic information, which includes family medical history. In the settled lawsuit, the fabric manufacturer Fabricut agreed to pay $50,000 compensation and provide anti-discrimination training to employees. In the second suit, a New York Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Founders Pavilion Incorporated, is similarly accused of requesting family medical histories during medical exams. So the EEOC reports that as of September 2012, which is the most recent data available, there are 762 charges of genetic discrimination that have been filed. NHGRI will continue to monitor the Founders Pavilion case, the second one here, and any other charges that actually reached the courts. On June, going back to the Supreme Court now, on June 3rd, and in a five to four ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that collecting and analyzing DNA from people arrested for serious crimes does not violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure. The ruling establishes that arrestee's DNA profile can be entered into a database before conviction of any crime to determine the involvement of the individual in unrelated criminal acts. The case in question involved in individuals whose cheek swab upon arrest for assault in 2009 led to him being charged and eventually convicted of an unselfed 2003 rape. The Supreme Court held that such DNA collection analysis is justified and legal, and that the invasion is minimal. The dissenting opinion countered that this allows DNA profiling without probable cause for suspicion in unrelated cases which violates the Fourth Amendment. The court's decision could have a widespread impact on genetic privacy, especially if it is applied in states that collect DNA upon arrest for minor crimes. Also, criminal rights advocates argue that the decision will disproportionately affect racial groups and racial minorities who are more likely to be arrested regardless of the crime and are overrepresented in law enforcement databases. The National Coalition for Health Professional Education and Genetics, or NISHPEG, recently ceased operation. As you know, NISHPEG promoted health professional education in human genetics and genomics for two decades. The group was initially founded in 1996 through a partnership of the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and NHGRI. Its director, Joan Scott, shown on the bottom left, announced that NISHPEG ceased operations at the end of August. NISHPEG has always had a liaison attend our council and has been a consistent partner with NHGRI over the years. Now, fortunately, the wealth of information and resources collected on its website will be maintained for the time being at the American Society for Human Genetics website. I just want to pause and applaud NISHPEG's important educational efforts and their many contributions to bringing together diverse healthcare provider disciplines that continue to implement genomic applications into medical care. I also want to thank Joan Scott and her predecessor, Joan McNerney, who's here for their many years of service. Featured as an NHGRI genome advance of the month since the last council meeting included publications describing metagenomic sequencing, the study bacteria and prehistoric mouths, child abuse and epigenetics, the human microbiome, and genetic regulation of Alzheimer's disease. But once again, there's also been considerable amount of genomics in the news since we last met. Forbes named the NIH the second of four government programs that drive innovation and mention the economic impact of the Human Genome Project as part of that announcement. I've had a busy summer in terms of media interactions with videotaped interviews by the Huffington Post, by Fox Business, and also by BioCentury TV. And then, oh, the Oprah Winfrey magazine ran a story on the microbiome, a topic that was also featured in an NPR story that ran eight minutes in air during morning edition. And then the human microbiome was also featured in the Daily Beast, which featured a recent study from Julie Segre's lab about the human fungal microbiome. And also in the news were a number of genomics researchers who authored, quote, the hottest papers published over the preceding two years, as well as papers published during 2012 that were the most cited by the year's end. There were 21 named overall with eight being in genomics. They included Council Member Rick Wilson, but also June Wang, Eric Lander, Kerry Steffensen, Elaine Martis, Gonzala Evacasis, Lee Ding, and Bob Fulton. In addition to genomics in the news, there's also genomes in the news, and there have been a number of genome sequenced since the last council meeting. These include genomes of the sacred lotus, the Norway spruce, the Batraean camel, the Mallard duck, the Pacific bluefish tuna, the Green Pot of Cacao, and also Pandora virus, oil palm, and the Chinese alligator. And also apparently a scientist obtained the supposed Bigfoot sample that we've been tracing for a while and determined that it was actually a mix of opossum and other species. Go figure. This was actually met by a genome daily scan poll asking, would you have taken the time to sequence the sample supposedly belonging to Sasquash, which yielded the following results. 18% said yes, of course I want to be the discoverer of Bigfoot. 16% said yes, just so we can put these claims to rest. 24% maybe, I might just want to see what the sample actually was from. 19% said no, are you kidding? What a waste of time. And 21% said no, Bigfoot has the right to privacy. Not my joke, but they just write them for me. Okay, let's move on now to our extramural research program. NHGRI's large scale genome sequence analysis centers continued to be highly productive, publishing 15 papers this quarter. These included studies of cancer, inherited disease genomics, comparative genomics, and sequencing methods development. Their current major research projects are focused on TCGA, Alzheimer's disease sequencing project in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging, and other complex genetic disorders. The centers are in the process of reorienting their goals towards the aims of the disease 2020 document presented at the last council meeting, particularly in the area of complex genetic diseases. Another component of our genome sequencing program, the Cancer Genome Atlas program, has faced the challenges of leadership changes. The two principal TCGA program directors from each institute, Brad Ozenberger, from NHGRI, and Ken Eschar from NCI have actually left the NIH recently for new career opportunities. I want to acknowledge Jeff Struing of NHGRI staff who stepped into Brad's role on an interim basis and has been very ably kept this program on track. We anticipate announcing a new NHGRI lead for TCGA very soon. Other leadership changes, Harold Varmas also named a permanent director of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics where TCGA is located. That new director is Lou Stout, a well-known and respected cancer researcher with a distinguished career in the NCI intramural research program. Meanwhile, TCGA remains on target to meet its goals. Sample collection should be completed in early 2014. Data is already available for 8,500 tumor specimens from 26 tumor types. This graph shows the progress over the last year with a top line indicating tumor cases qualified and shipped to the analysis centers from about 6,000 a year ago to more than 8,000 today. The subsequent lines show the availability of primary analysis files from the TCGA data portal. Overall, the project is on course to analyze roughly 11,000 specimens by the project's end. Although sample accrual will be completed early next year, we anticipate another year or two of continued activities to complete the full spectrum of analyses. A new and exciting direction for TCGA is a recently completed large-scale pan-cancer analysis across the major tumor projects. Data from the 12 most advanced tumor project listed in this figure were normalized and integrated to search for common features in the biology of cancer. Data files for more than 5,000 tumor samples were analyzed during this process. The group's integrative and cross-tumor analyses revealed a spectrum of mutations associated with different carcinogenic etiology, such as tobacco and viral pathogens in different parts of the body. The genomic and epigenomic patterns that characterize and define multiple cancer subtypes, the cellular pathways that appear to be involved in multiple cancer types that could be clinically actionable, and the separation of important molecular patterns that are tissue-specific from those that are disease-specific all time to the fore in much more interesting ways when you do such pan-cancer analyses. And this groundbreaking pan-cancer work will be published in the next few weeks in approximately 30 papers which will be linked and threaded similar to the set of encode papers last year. The next component of our genome sequencing program, the Centers for Mendelian Genomics started their work roughly 20 months ago aiming to elucidate the genomic basis for as many Mendelian diseases as possible using whole genome exome, I mean, I'm sorry, whole exome sequencing as their main approach. In terms of disease gene discovery, the groups have collectively generated more than 9600 whole exome sequences and studying over 617 rare diseases. 61 of these diseases have not been described before. These efforts have resulted in the discovery of 199 disease genes underlying 114 diseases. 64 of these disease genes have not been previously implicated in any disorder. There have been 31 publications so far from the Centers with 22 reporting discoveries of disease genes, six describing methods and resources, and three providing information about practices for data sharing including publications about the informed consent process. In terms of the network and its outreach, the Centers have thus far collaborated with 384 investigators from 189 institutions in 30 countries. And furthermore the program is member of the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium IRD IRC with center members serving on committees and working groups for this young consortium. Next component of our genome sequencing program, the Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research, or CESAR program began with six awards in 2012 to support investigations of the technical challenges and the ethical and psychosocial implications of applying genome sequencing for medical care. We recently announced awards for three new project sites. The projects include a variety of different clinical situations including pediatric developmental disorders at the Hudson Alpha Institute, preconception carrier testing at the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute, and rare tumor sequencing at the University of Michigan. And this last award at the University of Michigan is being co-funded by the National Cancer Institute. We also announced a new CESAR coordinating center at the University of Washington. This group will lead important activities to disseminate the findings and approaches from CESAR to the broader biomedical research community. And the addition of these new grantees presented an opportunity to consolidate CESAR with our Return of Results Consortium which focuses on behavioral, social, and normative research on returning genomic results. And investigators in that consortium are now formally part of CESAR Consortium and fall under our new CESAR coordinating center. And the fourth component of our Genome Sequencing Program, the Genome Sequencing Informatics Tools Program, is known by the name iSeqTools. As a reminder, this program is comprised of six projects that are developing approaches to provide user-friendly sequence analysis tools. The primary target for this program is the community of users outside of large genome centers. The program will soon release the iSeqTools portal as an important gateway to these tools. The heart of the portal is a dynamic visualization panel that will enable scientists to quickly identify the appropriate tools and pipelines for their sequence analysis tasks. And an easy to navigate subway map of sorts will be provided to help researchers prepare their analyses rapidly and seamlessly. And users will be able to choose from all available tools and pipelines developed by the six participant projects and then drill down to details and individual tools with a semantic zoom web feature navigating from a global view down to details of the workflow pipeline and tool views. So moving on to our DNA sequencing technology development. In terms of our technology development efforts, this year NHGRI made eight awards for research to reduce the cost and improve the quality of DNA sequencing. The topics of these new studies range from improving the qualities of libraries for current next generation platforms to nanopore-paced electronic sequencing to sequencing by synthesis methods and to also including exploring two completely novel methods for detecting sequence. Now RFAs for R21, R01 and SBIR grants were reissued for one additional receipt date which is October 17th of this year. Moving on to ENCODE, the goal of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements or ENCODE project is to create a catalog of all functional elements in the human genome and other genomes into catalog freely available as a resource to the biomedical community. In terms of ENCODE outreach activities, there will be a tutorial on how to use ENCODE data and also the common funds epigenomics projects data at the annual American Society of Human Genetics meeting in October. This interactive tutorial will include round table discussions in addition to presentations on usage of these data. It will also be an ENCODE tutorial at the January cohorts for heart and aging research in genomic epidemiology or charge consortium meeting. The charge consortium facilitates genome-wide association study meta-analyses and replication opportunities among multiple large cohort studies. ENCODE anticipates that collaborations between charge and ENCODE members may be forged through this action. Cross-species interactive analysis of functional elements is well underway with manuscripts submitted and under review. Both MOD ENCODE and mouse ENCODE groups have submitted main cross-species comparison papers and companion papers. NHGRI has been tracking publications that use ENCODE, MOD ENCODE, and mouse ENCODE data. These are published from the link on the sidebar of the ENCODE portal as shown here. ENCODE-funded publications are tracked separately from publications by non-ENCODE authors. So ENCODE-funded publications include 19 papers by the mouse ENCODE group and over 220 papers by the ENCODE production groups and over 120 papers by the MOD ENCODE project. There were at least 280 publications that use ENCODE data and have been published by non-ENCODE authors and at least 80 publications that use MOD ENCODE data and have been published by non-MOD ENCODE authors. Note that these numbers are likely an underestimate because we manually curate the lists and really don't have a systematic way to find all such publications. And as shown on this graph for both classes of papers, the number of publications using ENCODE data has been steadily increasing over time and is overall really quite impressive. Now back at its May 2011 council meeting, this council approved a concept clearance for an effort to study the genomics of gene regulation. That program ended up getting delayed due to the budget uncertainties in fiscal year 2012 and then the sequester of fiscal year 2013. But I'm pleased to tell you that the genomics of gene regulation RFA was finally released in early August. The goal of this initiative is to support a set of demonstration projects that will explore the feasibility of predicting gene expression from genomic sequence. The program will use genomic approaches to understand the role of DNA sequence in gene regulatory networks and will combine computational analyses of networks along with functional genomic studies of the underlying regulatory elements. And applications are due in November with this council then discussing their reviews at the May 2014 meeting and funding to start a few months later. This year's annual meeting of the Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science, our SEGS program along with the Diversity Action Plan meeting will be hosted by the Wisconsin SEGS, half of which recently moved to the Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio. The new SEGS applications received over the summer will be reviewed later this fall and will then be discussed by council at the February 2014 meeting. This council's genomic medicine working group continues to expand its portfolio of activities surrounding the implementation of genomic medicine. Its fifth genomic medicine meeting was held in May of this year and focused on genome-wide strategies for genomic medicine implementation. That meeting included representatives from over a dozen different federal organizations and NIH institutes as well as the military medical services and the Veterans Health Administration. Plans are also underway for the sixth genomic medicine meeting of international leaders who are developing their own functional plans and strategies for research, education, and implementation in genomic medicine. This meeting is likely to be held in January of 2014. And there is much more going on related to this working group which you'll hear about when Terry Minolio gives you an annual update about their progress in this open session. Now, coming out of the fourth genomic medicine meeting last January was the creation of an inter-society coordinating committee for practitioner education in genomics. This group held its first meeting by webinar earlier this year and we'll meet face-to-face later this month. Education in genomics for physicians and allied health professionals has not kept pace with genomic technology and knowledge. This committee aims to coordinate the medical societies and colleges by attempting to address barriers and expand education healthcare providers across disciplines. Now, the response of the societies to call for participation has been quite good. With approximately 20 societies joining the meeting this month as listed here and you can see the alphabet soup shown below. Other NIH institutes and centers are also expressed interest in participating and many will be sending representatives to this meeting as well. The population architecture using genomics and epidemiology, or PAGE program, focuses on describing the genetic variants underlying a wide range of common diseases and traits in large ethnically diverse cohorts. Last week, we announced the grants funded as part of PAGE 2. Study cohorts in PAGE 2 include Women's Health Initiative, the Mount Sinai Biobank, the Calico Consortium, and the Multi-Ethnic Cohort Study. The awarded projects and the coordinating center at Rutgers University in collaboration with the Center for Inherited Disease Research and the genotype of approximately 50,000 participants of non-European descent from well-described cohorts provided a clear picture of how genetic variation, including rare and functional variation, is associated with a range of human diseases and traits. And then following discussions with this council and the NICHD Council in May and June of this year, awards for the joint NICHD and NHGRI genomic sequencing and newborn screening disorders initiative were announced last week. The initiative will feature four pilot research projects that are the sites of which are listed here that will aim to integrate and investigate the implications, challenges, and opportunities associated with the possible use of genomic sequence information in the newborn period. And each of these awards will be for approximately $1.2 million per year for five years. On July 8th of this year, the staff of the Division of Genomic Medicine presented a webinar that highlighted some of the current uses of NHGRI's GWAS catalog and explored the future directions for this resource. Charred by Nancy Cox, an international panel of researchers discussed how they are using the catalog in such projects like GTEX as well as studies of gene-gene interaction and regulatory genomics. The webinar also presented the scientific community an opportunity to provide feedback to the catalog staff. And the entire webinar is archived on the web and you can find it at the relevant links at document 36. The key goal of the Emerge Network is to explore and disseminate the best approaches to incorporate genomic variant data into electronic medical records for use in clinical care. The Emerge Network recently released several web-based tools to support this mission. Just by way of highlights, MyResults.org hosted by the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia provides an intuitive platform designed for clinicians and patients to provide information about genetic test results such as drug dosing implications of pharmacogenomic results in language for the lay person. The Emerge sites have also developed clinical decision support or CDS tools to present genetic information to physicians in ways that can be easily integrated into the clinical workflow. An example developed by the Mount Sinai group is the clinical implementation of personalized medicine through electronic health records and genomics, also known as the clip merge tool which is used to deliver decision support messages to physicians. And finally the smart genomics advisor platform a tool that integrates genomic information with electronic health records to produce standardized reports will be evaluated and piloted across the Emerge sites. Moving on to our SEER program NHRI funded five Centers of Excellence in LC research SEERS grants earlier this summer. The two five-year P50 specialized centers were funded by the University of North Carolina Columbia University. The University of North Carolina Center is a renewal of their program and will be addressing the implications of integrating preventive genomics into healthcare for the general public. The Columbia University Center was originally funded as an exploratory center and now has made the transition to a full P50 center. It has focused on the impact of psychiatric, neurological and behavioral genetic and genomic information at the individual familial and societal levels. Three three-year P20 exploratory centers were also funded. The University of Utah Center is focusing on issues surrounding the use of genomics in prenatal and newborn screening. The John Hopkins University Center is focusing on issues surrounding the application of genomics to infectious diseases and epidemics. And the Kaiser UCSF Center is organizing Kaiser's research program on genes, environment and health to address key LC questions in translational genomic research. Relevant to our SEERS program, our LC research program and our LC research program, the next meeting of the genomics and society working group of this council will be held in November. This meeting will discuss three critical aspects of genomics and society research efforts at NHGRI. First, determine which priorities are the current priority settings of approaches effective and how can they be improved. Second, the strengths and weaknesses of different funding approaches and mechanisms, which mechanisms are most effective and what is the appropriate balance among these mechanisms. And third, the establishment of boundaries of LC research, which research areas are within the scope of NHGRI's LC research program and which are not. And in preparation for this meeting, three smaller working groups have been formed to identify key issues surrounding each of these topics, gathering the information and bringing it to the rest of the group and lead the discussion at the November meeting. Now, back in April of this year, NHGRI held a workshop that took a careful and critical look at NHGRI's extramural training and career development programs. That workshop was co-chaired by Gal Jarvik and Bob Waterston with a summary available as document 40. The aims of the workshop and our subsequent internal discussions include the three things listed here, aligning research training and career development programs within NHGRI's strategic plan to prepare future leaders in genomic science and genomic medicine, also to harmonize our training and career investment with the rest of NIH. And from those efforts, NHGRI has now formulated a plan for enhancing its extramural training and career development programs, something that Heather Jenkins will be presenting to you in detail later in this open session. So those are NHGRI extramural research program updates. Let me move on now to this category, NIH Common Fund, but we're also including in this trans-NIH initiatives as well. So starting with the Molecular Libraries Program, the NIH Common Fund's Molecular Library Program is in its final year of the production phase. It will thus end next year after nine years of producing research caliber probes on requests from investigators. Some of the important milestone achievements of this program are completion of 544 high-throughput screens, discovery of 355 small molecule probes and publication of 676 articles and peer-reviewed journals. The screening center's goals for the remaining time include completing their projects, placing all data in PubChem, and filing probe reports to the NCBI bookshelf. Future screening by these centers will depend on NIH institutional support through research project grants. Program announcements for high-throughput screening project applications are out and signed on to by many of the categorical disease-oriented institutes and centers. Catalyzed by the Human Microbiome Project, NHMP, 16 institutes and centers at NIH have begun developing extramural human microbiome research programs. Investigators from the HMP and staff from these 16 institutes and centers have organized a meeting to map the future of microbiome research. The Human Microbiome Science vision for the future meeting was held in July at which presenters' presentations came from 35 well-renowned microbiome researchers describing recent advances and highlighting significant gaps, needs, and challenges for the field. The meeting was at capacity with over 250 participants and an equal number viewing the daily live webcast, and white papers for the meeting are being prepared for consideration at Nature and also the Journal Microbiome. And a complete meeting archive consisting of all the videos of the talks and also the actual PowerPoint presentations are available at Document 42. Now, more than 20 terabytes of HMP data have been submitted to NCBI and the HMP Data Analysis and Coordination Center. However, in order to analyze these HMP data, researchers must review the data and install tools on their local computers which requires significant computing resources that may not be available to all investigators. So in response to these challenges, NHGRI and NIAID has initiated the NIH Microbiome Cloud Pilot to examine the use of cloud computing with biomedical big data, specifically to develop a better understanding of how the cloud environment can be utilized for the storage management and analysis of such large data sets. Now, this effort will provide HMP data on the Amazon cloud starting this month and then in December of this year, a larger collection of materials will be available on the Amazon cloud. Well, the results and the lessons learned in evaluation of this pilot will be shared with the broader scientific community and will help inform NIH's guidance policy and governance procedures for using the cloud for biomedical research data and analysis. And lessons learned from the NIH Microbiome Cloud project should also be relevant for other aspects of genomics and data science research that NHGRI is carefully following. Okay, relevant developments with the Knockout mouse phenotyping project or COMP2 include a recent paper published in PLOS-1 from the Jackson Lab Group on the quote, perfect host technology that promises significant improvement in the efficiency of generating knockout mice. Specifically, this mouse host embryo selectively ablates its own germ cells, allowing competent micro-injected ES cells to fully dominate the germ line and eliminating competition for this critical niche in the developing an adult animal. Overall COMP2 production is on track as shown in this progress graph from the Jackson Laboratory. The top graph shows ES cell micro-injections. Yellow is goals and the blue line is actual production. The lower graph shows production of mouse strains where the ES cell has transmitted through the germ line. Again, yellow reflects the goals and the blue line is the actual numbers. The green shaded area that you see on the bottom right shows excess of production relative to the goals. Another common fund project, the Genotype Tissue Expression or GTEX project aims to study human gene expression and regulation of multiple tissues through genomic analyses of rapid autopsy samples. The goal is to gain key insights into the mechanisms of gene regulation and in the future its disease-related perturbations. GTEX successfully completed its pilot phase and released the pilot data in April through DbGaP. This release included genotype data from 181 postmortem samples and over 1800 RNA-seq studies from 38 different tissue types. Now the project has now entered its scale-up phase and donor enrollment is ramping up to include 900 genotype donors and over 25,000 RNA-seq studies. In June, GTEX held its first open community meeting in Boston. Over 250 people attended and significant interest was generated about the eventual resources that the project will create. Presentations from both GTEX and non-GTEX investigators demonstrated the wide range of analyses that can be performed using GTEX data. And finally, there was a robust response to an RFA to enhance GTEX with additional molecular assays and those applications will be discussed in the closed session of this council meeting. Moving on to the Library of Integrated Network-Based Cellular Signatures or LINX Common Fund project, which aims to create a network-based understanding of biology by cataloging changes in gene expression and other perturbations that occur when cells are exposed to a variety of agents. LINX uses computational tools to integrate this diverse information into a comprehensive view of normal and disease states that can be applied for the development of new biomarkers and therapeutics. The NIH Common Fund has approved the second phase of LINX, which will begin in fiscal year 2014. So towards that end, a new RFA calling for LINX data producing centers for phase two has been published. And in addition, an RFA for a joint LINX BD2K Coordinating Center is currently being drafted. Now LINX held a community meeting, it's 2013 community meeting in workshop or will take place at the Broad Institute in coming up in November. The meeting will feature introductory workshops on LINX resources, power user workshops for experienced users of LINX resources, and also a variety of presentations on the current uses of LINX data and potential future uses of that data. And this meeting is open to everyone. The Human Heredity in Health in Africa, our H3Africa Common Fund project aims to develop a sustainable and collaborative African genetics and genomics research enterprise. The H3Africa Consortium recently funded 11 new grants, bringing the total to 21 projects. These include a bioinformatics network, pilot biorepositories, and specific projects working on various health conditions and areas that are listed here. Now the next H3Africa Consortium meeting will be held in October in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first two days the meeting will focus on interactions with the working groups and the steering committee, who will be discussing and ratifying various documents and policies. And the last day in a half of the meeting are open to the public and will include H3Africa PIs presenting their projects and genome analysis session focusing on strategies for effective study of genetic variation in Africa. And with these new grants, H3Africa now has a total of 21 projects funded by the NIH or the Welcome Trust. And there are 21 primary awards in eight different countries and 95 collaborators in 26 countries. And we graphically represented that here so that you can see that H3Africa is doing a pretty good job at touching many parts of the African continent even in its early days. Among the newest common fund projects is the Undiagnosed Diseases Network, or UDN, which is being established to increase the capacity for and use of genomic data in the diagnosis of rare and new diseases. The network also helps to aid in management strategies for patients with such disorders. The UDN currently has one open funding opportunity to establish a DNA sequencing core for network patients. This RFA seeks applications that will provide high quality DNA sequencing and clear variant validation services to the UDN. The due date for applications is in November. Now in terms of trans-NIH initiatives, I've mentioned to council previously that NIH is tackling the big data challenges facing biomedical research by a fairly aggressive multi-pronged approach. This includes the establishment of a new NIH leadership position, the associate director for data science, an individual who report to the NIH director and will be the NIH leader for data science. And on an interim basis, I'm serving in this position in an acting capacity. But it also includes a new internal governance group overseeing data science called the Scientific Data Council, and finally a multi-faceted program called Big Data to Knowledge BD2K. So I'm going to give you brief updates about these three components. In terms of recruiting an associate director for data science I'm actually, it was the co-chair of the search committee and can tell you that that search is reaching a very mature stage. We have some strong and viable candidates and it's in the hands of Francis Collins and he hopes to finalize this recruitment really in the coming months, or the coming weeks or at least maybe a month or two. For the Scientific Data Council I thought you'd be interested to see its membership, so shown here is the current membership. Now this is a, it has an internal group but it has trans-NIH representation that's provided not only by different institutes and centers being represented but also different types of NIH leaders, including institute directors and deputy directors, institute division directors, administrative management leaders, and a number of key member, scientific directors, but also members, key members of the central NIH leadership. And I can tell you as the acting chair of this group, it's now operational and meeting on a regular basis to deal with a number of important data science issues, but it's also waiting for a rival of its permanent chair who will be the associate director of data science. And probably the most important initial responsibility of this group is to provide internal oversight of the big data to knowledge BD2K initiative which it is now doing. And in terms of BD2K, and as I mentioned earlier, the sequester is delaying the launch of the training component, the software development component, and the second round of the center's component of BD2K. Even so, three request for information RFIs have been published to collect input for framing the BD2K components. Those RFAs related to the data catalog, to software needs, and to training needs. And excellent responses have been received to all three. Those fed into workshops. Two BD2K workshops have been held to date, one on training and one on data catalogs. And two more workshops will be held later this month. One to enable research using clinical data and another one on developing a framework for community-based standards. Additionally, one FOA has been published, soliciting applications for investigator-initiated BD2K centers of excellence. Applications are due in late November and there will be an applicant information session in the form of a webinar later this week. And questions about this FOA can be sent to this email address, BD2KCentersRFA, at mal.nih.gov. And I will remind council that applications to this FOA and their reviews will eventually come to this council for your consideration and feedback. Moving on to our Division of Policy Communications and Education, just one update to give. That update relates to the Genomic Healthcare Branch who held a G2C2 resource review meeting with pharmacist representatives in June. Reggie Frye, James Hoffman, Grace Kuo, and Mary Roder, all representatives of pharmacist professional organizations that are collaborating to develop the resource met with NHGRI's Gene Jenkins to review recently approved pharmacist genetics genomics competencies and evaluate submitted genomics education resources for approval and entry to the G2C2 site. And the pharmacist G2C2 resources are planned to be available this fall bringing the total number of health professionals represented in the resource to four. And finally, just a couple of highlights from our intramural research program. One I can tell you that Charles Rotimi, NHGRI Senior Investigator and Director of the NIH Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health has been made honorary professor in the Division of Human Genetics at the University of Cape Town. In terms of recent publication highlights from our intramural research program include the following. I mentioned one earlier, Julie Segre and her NCI colleagues published in Nature the first study of fungal diversity on the human skin surface. Their work was an extension of her recent genome sequencing studies of the skin microbiome. Chuck Venditti, Irina Manoli and their NIDDK colleagues reported in PNAS that a set of biomarkers indicates kidney damage in mice and humans with methameronic acidemia. They demonstrated that antioxidant therapy protected kidney function in these mice and are making plans for a clinical study of these patients with this disease. And finally Bill Gaul and colleagues published in the New England Journal of Medicine a description of a rare neutrophil disorder and identified gene the VPS-45 gene as the defective gene in this genetic condition. The new immunodeficiency syndrome involves defective endosomal intracellular protein trafficking. And that's it. So I should say finally a personal thanks as always to the many people. Large fraction of which are sitting in the back of the room, probably over 50 to 60 of you helped to pull together all these slides for this director's report that I just reviewed. Needless to say I couldn't do it without all of your efforts and as always a special thanks to Chris Watterstrand shown here at the Smithsonian exhibition looking at one of the interactives who serves as the ringleader in coordinating material development and who directly helps me produce the final PowerPoint file that you just saw. And thanks to Larry Thompson and the NHRI web team for making the director's report a permanent electronic resource. And I will stop and happily take questions you might have. Thank you. So Eric I had two questions for you. Both they're sort of societal trends issues and wondering how NHGRI could interact. One is the growth of the epic electronic medical record and the fact that it seems to be I think at this point more than 50% of the installations and so it's rapidly becoming an industry player and whether there are efforts to reach out to them and see about trying to encourage some kind of greater involvement of both genetics, family history and genome data with them. I mean there are I guess a privately held company that is really becoming quite dominant. The other policy issue just reminded me was when you mentioned that there's going to be a new search in general whether the entire issue of sharing of clinical laboratory reports which was put in front of the AMA last summer by a collaboration between the College of American Pathologists and the American Public Health Association indicating that it's actually a public health issue for our ability to interpret and use genomic information wisely in the clinic is something that needs to be encouraged. I'm wondering whether that is something that could be put on the new attorney, the new surgeon general's agenda if and when he or she arrives. Let me ask Terry Minolio to field the first question and if anybody else wants to help me field the second one I'd welcome that but I have a few comments but anybody else in the city of the back welcome to step to a microphone. In regard to Epic as you note it really is becoming one of the dominant players if not the dominant player and I know there are others in the room that know a fair amount more about this than I. We have tried to engage them through Emerge and while they've been interested I think they're kind of waiting for someone and we would be happy to take that role when it sort of crystallizes to define what kind of content should actually be in their medical record and what sorts of tools they should be using. I think they would be interested in adopting them at that point but they haven't been at least with us really reaching out to us. They have many other things I think that are a higher priority for them. Howard, did you want to comment perhaps? Okay, thanks. Maybe Howard too? I want to be twiddled to you by the way, not the other one. I think that it's certainly true that Epic is taking the lead and Emerge has had a lot of dialogue with him over the last three years. There has been some action mainly driven by the customers where the customers are asking for cancer specific, HIV specific, et cetera tools within the electronic medical record. So I think the combination of activity from the NIH and NIH related organizations and the customer is starting to drive change It's such a small part of the overall health system that Emerge is giving it a small amount of effort, at least a visible effort. It could be to have thousands of people working on it but it's certainly not apparent at the moment. I would also pay attention to the interoperability standards so that we are not locked into particular vendor or two. You raise a superb point. Epic is not terribly interoperable within itself and that's a major issue. But you're absolutely right and how we can address that. What we're hoping is that we can develop some kind of an intermediate that then could be customized to each of the applications but still would include the content that we feel is important. I really brought it up just because I think it's a real challenge for an organization like NHGRI or NIH to figure out how to navigate multi-billion dollar free enterprise system that has such a huge impact and is run primarily by medical centers as opposed to medical schools. I would guess that the vast majority of your grants and the people that are NHGRI are not administrators in medical centers. They are faculty at medical schools and I don't know if there even is an avenue for having an impact on this. But the issue of interoperability is huge and I think it would be a missed opportunity. But I'm not sure that NHGRI or NIH is actually even the right organization for this but I don't know who else would be. Well and we are I think hoping to rely heavily on our library medicine colleagues who are working very actively in developing HL7 standards and lowing standards so Clement Donald and Betsy Humphries have been quite active in that area. Obviously the Office of National Coordinator is also working there as well but engaging these providers, we agree completely that it's important we're still kind of struggling with how best to do it. Lord, are you going to address the first question and or the second? I can do both. So I just wanted to follow on to the discussion that you were just having just to say that the policy issues, well we're still going to have us we're going to be able to make inroads into the free market in terms of how it's developing but from a policy perspective that's really what our genomic health care branch was doing and why we're looking for a chief to get that branch up and running again so that we can interact on the more administrative side around how these things are happening and try to work towards interoperability and we are still engaged in those discussions but not as maximally as we would like to be but we're keeping an eye on it. And with regard to the Surgeon General, I'm starting to hear rumors about names for potential candidates so I think we're getting close to having a successor and certainly when that happens we will want to engage with them as we did when the last Surgeon General came on to let them know what we're doing to talk to them about family history. We've maintained our staff contacts but certainly bringing up new topics will be something we'll reach out and do once they're in place. I mean I would really point out especially anybody listening tuning in or any of you have got, I mean there really are some incredibly important and substantive policy things have to be tackled in so many different areas and the truth of the matter is it can't fall only on the shoulders of extramural staff, Terry's staff and that's why very much I mean it has to be done in partnership and especially the policy takes place in Laura Rodriguez's division. We just need leaders to help I mean that's why we have a recruitment to fill director of this branch. If you know of people out there especially who are really medically engaged and really seize some policy challenges assigned they want to participate in and help us change the world I mean it's a great opportunity for an individual for a position but it really requires somebody who's going to take this on spending most of their time doing it. Other questions? If not we're going to go right to Artie's. I was told if I raised my hand that someone in the back would see this and come out we need to switch over the control. I think they're probably going to do it from back. So Artie you want to come up? Eric has essentially done this introduction but I think Artie and Eric met at the Supreme Court Well we had known each other before. We were both there in person on the floor of the Supreme Court watching the arguments made and we caucused quickly afterwards because we could have had a presentation at the May Council meeting but we knew that the decision would come out before the September Council meeting and so our decision was rather than giving you her perspective on what we had just heard that day it would be even better to have her give a complete review of the circumstance after the decision was out and so we delayed any presentation from her actually we delayed your presentation from the May meeting figuring it would even be more substantive now so please take over. So thanks very much. I appreciate the small introduction already.