 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to this NHGRI-sponsored symposium entitled Genome Exploration by Large-Scale Sequencing, circa 2007 and beyond. This event commemorates the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center, or NISC. I'm Eric Green, and I am NHGRI's scientific director, and also NISC's founding and current director, and I'll be serving as the host of today's symposium. But before we launch into our talks by our distinguished group of visitors, I thought it would be appropriate for me to provide a brief review of NISC's history and to also set a context for today's celebration. This is NIH from an aerial photograph of the main Bethesda campus. We're actually sitting for our visitors in this building right here, which turns out to be the world's largest clinical research hospital. The NIH's on-campus intramural program is a roughly $3 billion a year research enterprise that is carried out by about 1,200 principal investigators. The diversity of basic and clinical research programs represented on this campus alone is truly spectacular. Since its establishment some 14 years ago, the NHGRI intramural programs really has viewed one of its main reasons and mandate, if you will, is to include and to keep the NIH intramural program contemporary and cutting edge with respect to genetics and genomics. Now if we wind the clock back, say, by 11 years to 1996, you may recall that those of us in the genomics community were just figuring out how to sequence complex genomes with plans then being formulated to accelerate the sequencing of the human genome as part of the human genome project. At that time, it was already clear that DNA sequencing and sequence analysis was going to become central to many, many areas of basic and eventually clinical research. How could this outstanding research institution not have a state-of-the-art DNA sequencing facility? As a result, I was personally encouraged by the NHGRI leadership, Francis Collins, and then scientific director Jeff Trent, and also by the NIH leadership, then NIH director Harold Varmas and the deputy director for intramural research, Michael Goddisman, to consider establishing a large-scale DNA sequencing program at NIH. I personally had just been recently tenured at the time, and in fact, I was looking for a new challenge, and meanwhile, as many of you know, I have a bit of energy. And so I personally ran with the notion of starting a trans-NIH sequencing center and actually, and not surprisingly, setting a very aggressive timetable for its establishment. Enthusiasm among many of the NIH institutes and centers was actually quite high. And in a matter of months, we had resource commitments from 14 institutes and centers to start the NIH intramural sequencing center. Space is always a challenge at NIH, especially here on the main campus. And so we searched for space options off campus. Jim Batty, who's actually here in the second row today, was then the scientific director of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, and he generously offered us temporary space in their Gaithersburg, Maryland facility so that we could open NISC stores quickly in 1997. In short order, we got started, which meant we hired an initial staff of about six people and converted this storage closet into a room to house our six brand-new model, ABI model, 377 sequencing instruments. Of course, it turns out we first had to install an air conditioning unit in the ceiling to handle the cooling for a room that previously housed broken down equipment and other archived junk, but we were up and running. Within the year, we moved to our first real home in this refurbished building also in Gaithersburg that formerly was the home of the company BRL, which later became Life Technologies. More space meant more people, although we were still a modest sized group. From the beginning, NISC benefited from terrific relationships with our colleagues at the other major sequencing centers who generously shared their expertise and always welcomed us to visit their centers to learn about the latest technologies and developments. We've always felt to be a part of this community of sequencing centers. So even back then, we honored them in our lab by keeping track of their respective times at the University of Washington at Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University, Whitehead Institute and the Sanger Center. We even kept track of the dark side, Solarogenomics, although note our belief that there were routinely 20 minutes behind the rest of us. Now, as sequencing projects came in, mostly from NIH collaborators, we were able to expand our staff slightly. But we then earned the opportunity to participate in some major genomics projects, including the mouse genome sequencing initiative, the cancer genome anatomy project and eventually the mammalian genome collection. And as a result, our scientific efforts were able to grow and so did our staff and even our space. But eventually, we outgrew our first real home and so it was once again time to move on to get more space. In this case, to a building being constructed for various NIH groups in Rockville, Maryland, this ugly structure eventually became this beautiful building where NISC has made the top floor its second and current home. Now, our current space has the look and feel of a modern research facility and gives NISC the kind of long-term home that it deserves. Within this new building, we deliberately constructed a very large laboratory to house the NISC production operation, never imagining that we would actually fill it up. But guess what? We have, although we find this flexibility in this design extremely accommodating to the changing landscape of DNA sequencing, especially as technologies evolve. And with our additional space and the expanding nature of NISC's scientific pursuits, our staff has grown as well. And so shown here is the current NISC staff and some of the extended collaborative NHGRI family at a recent off-site retreat. Over the past 10 years, NISC has routinely acquired the necessary tools and technologies to operate a first-rate DNA sequencing program. Our abilities to stay at the cutting edge of large-scale sequencing have been aided by those interactions and collaborations with the other major sequencing centers, many of whose directors are among our featured speakers today. I wanted to include them in today's symposium, both because of the outstanding science they have to describe to you, but also because I want to personally extend my own thanks to them for their collaborative generosity and their remarkable spirit. It truly is a great community to be a part of. So here we are today, roughly 10 years, millions and millions of sequence reads and numerous projects, collaborations, and publications later. It has been a fabulous first decade for NISC. So what do you do to celebrate being 10 years old? Well, according to my two children, ages 7 and 11, there's only one thing to do. You have a birthday party. And that is what today is, a good scientific party to celebrate NISC's 10th and to celebrate genomics and DNA sequencing in the awesome future horizons associated with these areas of research. Coming up with a guest list for this party was relatively easy. First, I invited all the current and even some former NIS staff, an incredibly proficient and professional group. I wanted all of them to partake in this symposium as a tribute to their dedication and their accomplishments. And in fact, I would actually just like to start this morning by asking all the NIS staff, current and former to please stand up and get a round of applause. Second, we've invited the entire NHGRI family, the whole NIH community, and even various other local colleagues. I think as you will see as the day progresses, enthusiasm is really going to be quite high for this party. But of course, any good party requires good entertainment, and for that, we have the very best in the nine speakers that will follow. Collectively, they represent nothing short of an all-star group of genome scientists, admittedly heavily enriched for friends and collaborators of NISC, after all, who invites non-friends to your birthday party. So among the many things I expect you will gain from today's symposium is a profound appreciation of the exciting landscape that still exists in the arena of genome exploration by large-scale sequencing. So 11 years ago, when Collins and Varmas and Trent and Gottesman and even Green discussed the rationale for establishing NISC, it was very much predicated on the belief that the need for large-scale DNA sequencing would not end when the human genome project was over. Rather, it would massively increase in ways that we cannot even predict at that time. I hope that today's symposium will show you that our collective expectations were indeed correct and that the most exciting developments in DNA sequencing are still to come. So thank you very much. Enjoy the day.