 Thank you for coming. Welcome to the NIH. We've convened this meeting to announce the appointment of Dr. James Watson as the Associate Director for Human Genome Research of the National Institutes of Health. I really want to express my well, thanks to Jim Weingarten for the sort of vote of faith in me that I'm the person to sort of coordinate NIH's efforts into understanding the human genome. It's a goal which I certainly didn't have when we found the structure of DNA in 1953. It was any thought about knowing the sequence of a small piece of DNA had to seem like science fiction. Watson brought instant credibility. He was the best known biologist, probably the best known scientist in the world for him to walk into a congressman's office and say, we need to start this enterprise because it's going to change everything and it will ultimately benefit human health. He got instant ability to be heard. The reason why I'm so excited by really finding out what our DNA messages are. I think it's really two reasons. One, just a very practical. I think if we find out these messages, we will understand at a very deep level some diseases now which effectively totally baffle us and sometimes almost destroy us. As a physician, it is the medical implications of the genome project that have always seemed to me the most compelling. The reason to do this, the chance to alleviate suffering, to cure diseases that we currently have little to offer for, that's why we're doing this. That's the reason that Congress wanted to pay for it. The other reason is, you know, as a scientist, DNA is really the message of life. When the genome project started, sequencing a thousand base pairs would cost you $10,000 and would take you the better part of a week if you're going to do it to high accuracy, even if you knew what you were doing. And this crazy band of genome enthusiasts, we're out there saying we're going to do three billion of these and we're going to do it for less than tenfold that cost and it's going to be highly accurate and it's all going to get done in 15 years. It was a bold, even foolhardy approach, I think some might say. You know, there were a lot of very animal people in it and I think that's what made, you know, the project could work because the people on the whole were not driven by their egos. They were driven by. This is hard to get the project done. The International Genome Sequencing Consortium, the 16 centers in six countries, had really learned how to do this awfully well. And we're cranking out a thousand base pairs every second, seven days a week, 24 hours a day. It was roaring into the databases and you could see the trajectory and you could see that we would get to that 90 percent point sometime around June. Today the world is joining us here in the East Room to behold a map of even greater significance. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind. We now have, with the human genome, the most quantitative imaginable representation of our own digital script. It's there. The genome project, of course, just ordered the letters, but didn't tell us what their meaning was and while we knew some things about how it was a DNA encoded function, we certainly didn't have a comprehensive view of that landscape. You know, before 2003, we could all talk about what we thought the genome was all about and which parts of it were doing what we didn't really know. So depending on whose vision you were referring to, you might be close to what turns out to be the case or way off because everybody was guessing. But now we don't have to guess anymore. I think one of the surprises that really emerged almost shortly after the genome project ended was the realization that there's probably more functional sequences outside of coding regions that are actually are protein coding regions. Just go back 10 years, just generated that first sequence of the human genome and the active sequencing part took about six to eight years, consumed about a billion dollars. That was about the cost for the actual active organizing for sequence, actually doing the sequencing. You know, 10 years ago when the genome project ended, if those same groups immediately would have produced a second sequence to human genome, hypothetically, they estimated it would probably take a maybe three to five months to do instead of six to eight years, but it would still cost about 10 to 50 million dollars. But now fast forward 10 years after these spectacular new technologies have been developed and were well under 10,000 dollars. In fact, the current estimates for getting a sequence of a human genome, something on the order of three, four, five thousand dollars in route to a thousand dollars, I think within a year or two. And remarkably, you could do it today in a couple of days and probably by the end of this calendar year on being told, probably within a day. When they first talk about the thousand dollar genome, I'll never see that. But now they're talking about the five hundred dollar genome. If the sequencing costs continue to drop, and I'm sure they will. And if third party payers decide that this is useful enough, that the cost is worth it to justify reimbursement, then I would see the opportunity for each of us having our constitutional genome determined as part of our medical care in a five year period from now. With the opportunity, therefore, to use that both for prediction of future illness, even though that'll still be a statistical statement and not as strong as some people might think. But also the pharmacogenomic part of that, which is enormously helpful. When the genome project began, we knew the genetic basis of maybe on the order of 60 diseases that were caused by defects in a single gene. The genome project accelerated the pace at which we were able to discover those genes and those mutations. So that by the time the genome project ended, that number was about twenty two hundred over the last 10 years. It's been more than doubled. We're almost up to five thousand disorders that we now know the genetic basis. A big challenge for the next few years, and I hope it's very few, is to figure out how to do that translation of what's currently a research enterprise as standard of care. I think we'll get there.