 Well, thanks, Eric. It's basically I can't do any better than that. So I guess I'll just go step down. Yeah, so Eric asked me to give some reflections on lessons learned or something like that. And so I decided to include the technology development program, but actually to go back all the way back, as Eric just described, and tell you some of the things that sort of influenced. I felt influenced my career. And I don't know, I never give advice. I always say that to applicants and so forth. But some reflections, observations, things that I've noticed over my career. And if they're useful for, none of them are novel. But maybe the way they were put together or the way they were derived will help some other people. So actually, I need to get out of this. Escape isn't doing anything. Click. There we go. OK. And the crazy title, by the way, is I've been here 24 years. But humans only have 23 pairs of chromosomes, so I had to add one. Sorry. So when I first thought about this, OK, 24 observations, lessons learned shouldn't be bad. Yesterday was a little sweat, but OK. So when I joined the Genome Institute at that time, as Eric mentioned, called the National Center for Human Genome Research, we had fewer than 50 people on the staff. About 42 of them are pictured here. As, again, as Eric mentioned, Jane Peterson recruited me to join her in running the centers program, which at that time involved about a dozen centers, most of which were building genetic or physical maps of the human and model organism genomes as a substrate for the Human Genome Project. I spent the first year learning and occasionally developing acronyms and learning NIH grants and administrative processes from the inside. During my first few years, let's see. I think I better, yeah, OK. During my first few years with such a small group, and yet with the need to do many of the things that much larger institutes do, we did a lot as a team. In particular, any plans related to program development and implementation were discussed with the entire program staff, all eight of us. Beyond that, for example, when it came time for developing and presenting the annual budget, all of us took part in preparing the congressional justification and the briefing cards that the budget officer kept in a flip book to back up the institute director who testified before both houses of Congress most years in those days. During those first few years, I was given primary responsibility for organizing three planning workshops, one on YACC library construction, one on the 100 kilobase resolution human genome physical map, and a third on validation for the upcoming DNA sequencing pilot projects. So this leads to my first list of lessons learned, and I'm not going to put the lessons up because for a lot of these, I'm going to actually flip through some slides to just give you images of those times. So I'm quite sure I didn't think about these things at that time, but now looking back, these were all critical lessons that influenced my time at NHGRI then and subsequent career at NIH. So first, understand your organization beyond your immediate role. And then some of these have corollaries from the other side. Give your people, if you're running the organization, give your people the chance to get to know the organization. Nothing beats immersion. Next, give your employees independence. They'll work harder, and they'll learn faster. Take on responsibilities and assignments, even if you're not sure you're ready. And the corollaries, of course, give your employees responsibility. Be willing to make decisions in a timely fashion. You don't know everything you need to know. With responsibility and independence, come accountability to learn to listen, to evaluate multiple viewpoints, and then to select a path thoughtfully and insightfully. And learn to work as an effective team member. Learn how to lead, learn how to follow, and learn how to keep those in balance. So when I'd been at the center's branch of NHGRI, now by this time NHGRI, with the establishment of the Intramural Program, for just four years, a couple of our key program directors, actually they're shown on this photo, decided to leave and join another institute. So technology development being a key element of our portfolio needed leadership. Our leaders gave me the option to take on this new role. I still felt quite wet behind the ears and thought perhaps I should continue under the wing of a more experienced program leader. Plus we were at a critical and very exciting stage in the center's program, having just developed the RFA for the pilot sequencing centers to begin scale-up towards sequencing of the human genome. But NHGRI was offering me an almost irresistible opportunity to step into a more prominent role, in a critical area to the human genome project. I also knew I'd have the support of my colleagues and after all, each program with the possible exception of LC included technology development to further its own goals. So I took that leap and became the program director for technology development. And by the following year, I'd released NHGRI's next in a series of technology development RFAs. So that same year, the small size of NHGRI again came into play. The NIH director's office was forming a new trans-NIH group called the Bioengineering Consortium. I was anything but a bioengineer, as Eric mentioned, my backgrounds in cell and molecular biology. Or knowledgeable about those approaches, but technology development was the closest thing we had in the institute, so I became an NHGRI's beacon member. Through this activity, I met program directors with portfolios related to mine, but ranging much more widely from across the entire NIH as well as a couple of other agencies. Through formulating several annual symposia held on the NIH campus and each attracting over 600 people, we developed a path for NIH to better engage this community of scientists and engineers. I learned a lot of new science. I learned a lot about how other institutes conduct their business, and I met a whole new community of investigators, that little circle that appeared down there is AIMB, and I had the honor to chair one of the symposia, the Nanomedicine Symposium, and to chair Beacon for three years. And one of the early measures was that quite a large proportion of the awards that were made under this program announcement, by the way, not an RSA program announcement, a large number of them were to new investigators. Now, these were not necessarily early stage. These were people who had never had an NIH grant before. We were trying to bring them into the community. So through Beacon activities, I was asked to be one of the NIH representatives to the interagency working group that developed the budget and the plan to launch the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Much like my experience with Beacon, I met a lot of people and learned practices across the federal government and once again learned a lot of new science. The NNI graduated from an executive order to having its own congressional appropriation. The NNI group from an initial six agencies, I guess nine agencies, this was actually a little bit into it, but we started with six agencies to 25. We developed a plan for NIH relevant nanotechnology research and tracked the activities both in the science and budget perspectives, preparing annual supplements to the President's budget, reporting progress and plans. I had to travel a lot speaking about the NNI and about Beacon to a variety of groups, so the scientific stretch was considerable and I had to convey this information to widely varying audiences. I even had the opportunity to testify before a Senate committee. So very clearly, my activities in these three realms in NHGRI technology development in Beacon bioengineering and the NNI nanotechnology research provided substantial interplay scientifically and programmatically. So lessons learned could be applied across all those activities. So some more lessons learned, be enthusiastic about shifting gears, taking risks and expanding and learning even when it's scary and corollary is give your people the opportunity to shift gears to expand and to learn. Staff turnover opens opportunities. Be enthusiastic about taking on extra work to make the most of those opportunities. I couldn't possibly have done my NHGRI, Beacon and NNI work in anything remotely like a 40 hour work week. I felt the extra investment was worth it. Some of your staff will be able and willing to take on extra work, but not everyone can do that. As an organization, don't take that for granted. So in part, as a result of my activities across NIH for Beacon and NNI, I was known to NIH leadership. And so when the first round of NIH roadmap initiatives was being developed, I was asked, as Eric mentioned, to lead one of them and then a medicine initiative. I ultimately ended up co-chairing that initiative. There's no question that the experience I gained to that point, firmly grounded at NHGRI and complimented by the Beacon and NNI experience, has helped inform the approaches to developing the nanomedicine roadmap and vice versa. So provide opportunities for your staff to become known to agency leadership. Wider exposure of our staff benefits the individual staff members' careers and the institute's programs. I should have gone through these a little bit more quickly because oh, there's just reflections of things that look familiar from the nanomedicine and some of our programs. And in addition to making your staff known to agency leadership, the other thing that this set of images represents is recognize your employees for their accomplishments. And NHGRI does a very good job of this, in my opinion. In early Beacon days and during the initial formulation of the NNI, we at NHGRI were putting together the Centers of Excellence in Genomic Science. That's not a good sign. Okay. Which I've coordinated since the beginning. Ideas developed and experienced gained in each of these fed into the others. And we launched the SEGs in 2000 and had our first annual meeting in 2003. That's also when the strategic plan for NHGRI after completing the Human Genome Project was published. The year before that we held a series of workshops, one of which led to our launching the near-term and revolutionary genome sequencing technology programs. The program is, you've all seen these slides many times, the program is fairly widely considered to have been successful. The program funded a wide variety of ideas through small grants and large grants, a varying duration but long enough to make progress at academic institutions and at company laboratories and substantial commercialization resulted. So for the purpose of this talk, what are the lessons learned from that program? So one is that we required participation and considerable information sharing at annual grantee meetings. Much information can be shared even in a very competitive field and that advances the science. The annual grantee meetings stimulate progress because investigators do want to impress each other and their program director with substantive reports and platform and poster sessions. Grantees are also motivated by learning how fast the field is moving. The grantee meetings stimulate novel collaborations. We had lots of people who ended up collaborating and even submitting applications who'd never met each other before these meetings. Publishing together promotes common cause. Students are immersed in rapidly advancing science from which they can see substantive beneficial outcomes to science and society and they also find their further training and job opportunities. An open meeting back to back with the grantee meeting widens the discussion beyond the grantees to include other academics, industry and the press stimulating additional collaboration, investment and dissemination. The success of a program may entail risk. The institute staff and advisors need to buy into the need to fund risky grants. I had tremendous support from the institute and from our advisors without which we would have failed. Close collaboration between extramural components in particular program and review offices can increase flexibility to advance the science without compromising the roles. Programs succeed in a relevant context the development of which the programs can help to stimulate. And finally, user demand helps drive technology. As these technologies were being introduced and were rolling out, they were pulled very quickly into many different projects that had different needs and that really helped that technology move forward. And finally, not to forget the need for community service. Community service is important. So just for example, I worked with Genome Canada over a two-year period as they were implementing their disruptive innovations in genomics program. Also worked with the local high school, though not as much as I should have. And of course, it's good to keep some service close to home. So this was my father's day card when my son finished first grade, our first year here. I don't know if you can see it says double helix straightened out. So in closing, just one more lesson. Each transaction in which you participate is an opportunity to build trust and confidence and to demonstrate your good judgment, integrity, and collegiality. So I hope a few of those will be helpful to some of you. Thank you. I am sure Jeff would be, if anybody has questions or any comments, Bob? So Jeff, I'm gonna put you on the spot a little bit if you don't mind. You've been looking back through all this talk. I wonder if you could make a few comments looking forward. Where do you think the sequencing is gonna go? Well, I'll repeat something I've said to this group before. I don't think we're anywhere near done. The qualities, the sequence quality we're getting today is pretty good, but there are a lot of qualities of that sequence that need considerable improvement. Both in terms of individual base pairs and the way the data will flow into pipelines. So I think we have a ways to go. I think we actually have examples now from nascent technologies that sequencing, well, we already know sequencing isn't a big deal if you have the right infrastructure, but now the infrastructure needs are changing considerably. So that you'll be able to do sequencing quite routinely, as you all know, as part of almost any kind of characterization of any material that you'd like to. So that's clearly a sea change. By sequencing, I guess I'd like to expand the definition of that, and we should think about sequencing not only of DNA nucleotides before, but all the modifications and all the other kinds of molecules that are made out of nucleotides and their modifications, RNA and those modifications, but perhaps with some creativity, we can sequence other kinds of biological molecules much, much, much more readily than we can and read out those modifications, including maybe even what proteins and other molecules are bound to the linear strands. So I think of sequencing in that much bigger context. And I guess if we could do all those things, and as we've been talking about through this meeting, pull that information together in an intelligent way, then I think a lot of the stumbling blocks we're reaching now might be somewhat overcome. There's a lot of other stuff that has to happen. The other part I guess I'd like to say is that if we can think about using some of the principles that have been applied to sequencing, to some of the other characterization challenges, and I'd include things like phenotyping, not even just molecular phenotyping, but other kinds of phenotyping with sensors and so forth, which after all, sequencer is just a sensor, that we could tackle some of the really hard problems that we're having in bringing genomics closer to the clinic, so a few thoughts. So I have something else that I need to mention, and that is, how did I get this? Yes, we have another major event happening at NHGRI, and that is one of our esteemed members of our bioinformatics portfolio is also retiring, and he's gonna be retiring before the end of this year and that's Peter Goode. So Peter's been around NHGRI for 15 years, almost as long as I have, not quite as long, and when Peter arrived at NIH in 2001, the state of our databases was nowhere near what it is today, and he really played a major role in helping to develop a lot of the really critically important infrastructure that we now take for granted and actually are worried about, can we support it all? So it grew very effectively and now we have to meet other challenges, but Peter had the insights about the importance of these data resources to the biology community, he came in as a developmental biologist, so he knew how important it was to have these kinds of tools and information at your fingertips, and he really helped to build that program. Peter was also critical in helping to start a number of large and visible programs, including the Cancer Genome Atlas and the Knockout Moss Project, so Peter's played a very important role, he also had a rich and deep portfolio of R01 and R21 grants. He worked with BISTI, so Peter's made major contributions through NHGRI and across the NIH. Most of you probably know Peter mostly from his work in ENCODE. So Peter and Elise started ENCODE and the early days formulated the concepts, launched the program, completed the pilot projects and then moved on from there. So I just wanna recognize Peter who's in the audience and I hope you all have a chance to wish him well.