 Eric Green, the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. And on behalf of NHGRI, I want to welcome you to our celebration of genomics, both of its recent past and, more importantly, its exciting future. I want to start today's symposium by just spending a few minutes setting a context for the event. NHGRI chose to hold this event today to commemorate really a truly historic year for both genomics and also specifically for our institute. Just to remind you, 20 years ago, this past October, the Human Genome Project began. At that time, I was a second-year postdoctoral fellow actually training with our wrap-up speaker that you'll see at the end of the day, and I could vividly remember the sense of purpose that all of us involved with the project felt about the planned effort. I can also remember the great sense of fear 20 years ago, as we were not exactly certain how it is that we were going to actually map and sequence the human genome. Those fears gave way to hard work and creative energies, and remarkably roughly 10 years ago in June of 2000, a draft human genome sequence was completed. President Clinton presided over this historic announcement of this incredible accomplishment at the White House, and even the popular press recognized that this was a huge moment for humanity. Just a few months later, the publication reporting the draft human genome sequence and its initial analysis was published and shown here as the historic issue of nature, published on February 15, 2001. Today's symposium is aligned around these historic events of 20 years and 10 years ago, but timed more closely to the 10th anniversary of this publication of nature. And the reason for that is that nature published yesterday something in an issue that essentially commemorated the 10th anniversary of this issue of nature, their latest issue of nature, and contained within that was an important paper for NHGRI and for the field of genomics and NHGRI therefore wanted to have this symposium specifically a day after this important paper came out, which is a new strategic vision for genomics formulated by the genomics community in partnership with NHGRI. It really represents a culmination of a two-and-a-half-year planning process that our institute went through to identify and really try to articulate the most exciting opportunities in genomics with a particular emphasis on medical applications of genomics. Now it's important in telling you about our strategic plan to really set a context recognizing that preparing and publishing strategic plans really is very common and I think it's part of the cultural aspects of both genomics and NHGRI. Part of the reason for that is what I articulated earlier. We got through the genome project guided by a series of overlapping strategic plans that really served a key organizing framework for accomplishing the audacious goals of the genome project. And when the genome project ended in 2003, we carried out a similar planning process for a couple of years that allowed us to put together a vision for genomics beyond the human genome project. The current process recognizing that the publication of 2003 probably needed to be renewed a little and updated, the current process for our institute was actually kicked off two-and-a-half years ago by then NHGRI director, a guy that you may have heard of called Francis Collins. When Francis departed the institute, Alan Gutmacher continued leadership of this planning process and then when I became the director about 14 months ago, I said we're going to finish this over the next year or so and get this out and indeed that is what we have now accomplished by getting it in this commemorative issue of nature. So all of you were provided a copy and if you didn't, they're out on the table, please take one of this issue of nature that came out yesterday, courtesy of Nature Publishing Group. It is a special anniversary issue of this and it contains several papers which I'll tell you about but I really do want to make a special thank you to Nature Publishing who I've just been terrific partners in this process and both Magdalena Skipper who is the editor that oversees genomics publications, also Phil Campbell who is the editor-in-chief of Nature and in particular they were out of their idea, they heard about this symposium today and actually extended the print run of Nature and rushed, shipped all these issues because they wanted all of you to have them in hard copy as part of this celebratory day. So my special thanks to Nature for being such wonderful partners in this. There are three papers of note in this issue, there is our paper charting a course for genomic medicine from base pairs to bedside, NHGRI's new strategic plan. There is a wonderful review by Eric Lander who you're going to hear from in a couple of speakers and I will just wait because I think he's going to tell you lots about the exciting things he describes in this review. There's also a very nice perspective about DNA sequencing technologies that Elaine Martis of Washington University wrote. When you actually open this issue and find our paper you will also see within it a very nice what's called a roll fold or a poster, it folds out and this to us is a, it serves as figure one as a nice reminder of all these incredible accomplishments that have taken place in genomics. Starting before the human genome project sort of on the left side and then sort of electrifying this futuristic light bulb as all of the data and technologies and opportunities that are created by all of these accomplishments in the genome project and before. And that has energized the field and propelled it forward on the right side of this figure over the last seven years or so and we've just sort of highlighted some of these incredible landmark milestones that have taken place. I would point out that one of the things if you ask me sort of what are the key things that has really energized and propelled the field of genomics forward, we wanted to sneak it in graphically and that's right there which is a simple representation of what's happened in DNA sequencing in the last five and six years or certainly since the end of the genome project and in fact we have as part of this paper now a website as an electronic supplement if you will, the paper talking about sequencing costs because we track them at NHGRI especially those associated with our large sequencing centers we would collect lots of information and now in downloadable form feel free to go to this website and download these images and we will continually update them as we collect more data. It's just this remarkable dropping of sequencing costs either categorized based on cost per megabase or cost per sequencing to human genome with the introduction of these two technologies notice the plummeting and the cost of sequencing. This is on a logarithmic scale and indicated in white is Moore's law, this law of the computer industry that everything doubles and gets better by a factor of two every 24 months. Sequencing technology has blown Moore's law out of the water and we believe this is one of the key things that has just catapulted genomics forward leading to all sorts of exciting opportunities that I am absolutely certain you'll be hearing about from various speakers today. Now the other thing about strategic plans we have found is that we need to have an organizing framework, the metaphors and just sort of imagery that sort of helps sort of give a framework for what we want to describe in our plans. I mean 2003 this was this famous house that organized our thinking around genomics as it connected to biology to health and society all built on a firm bedrock of the human genome project and this has served as well but it was time for sort of a more sophisticated more nuanced and more futuristic view of what's really going to happen as genomics gets applied to medicine and so we will be retiring this graphic and replacing it with figure two of the paper which we think now through a lot of great input we got from the community really helps capture many of the great hurdles that lie ahead but also many of these opportunities recognize minimum a series of progressive domains starting with understanding the structure of genomes understanding the biology of genomes moving on to understand the biology of disease using that information to advance the science of medicine and eventually improve the effectiveness of health care. Also we represented in totally hypothetical density plots accomplishments that one either we believe has happened during the genome project or in the previous seven years or more importantly as we project out the next decade or the decade beyond where we might be seeing major accomplishments in each of these five domains of activity. So we have organized our entire strategic plan around this these five areas and we I invite you to read the article that all of you now have before you and consider this and then think about what's been accomplished in the last two decades and more importantly for what we're thinking about in the future what's going to happen the next two decades. So this is a celebratory day for us and really a celebratory week. It was a long journey to get to this publication and involve lots of people and we thank many of those individuals who are in the audience and many elsewhere for helping us accomplish this important publication if you want to read more and get to all sorts of other information about our strategic planning process this is the URL genome dot gov backslash SP for strategic plan 2011. But now it's time to celebrate and we want to celebrate we actually wanted to pop champagne the NIH police don't allow alcohol on campus. We wanted to have fireworks the NIH fire marshal won't allow fireworks in natural auditorium. So we had to figure out another way to celebrate and our celebration is gather some of the great minds and genomics and some of our great colleagues bring them together for a day in here and let them lose and these are these individuals more detail of course is provided in the program and that's what the day is going to bring us. It includes some great figures in science and in genomics and genetics that includes the NIH director who I'll be introducing in a minute. It includes both of former NHGRI directors before myself one being the next speaker the NIH director but also includes Jim Watson who we're very glad is here and will be participating in the panel discussion after lunch. I should point out there's a slight deviation from the program in that we were hoping that congressman Michael Burgess of Texas was going to be able to join us for that panel discussion he's talked about in the program and we always it was always a dicey situation because it all was related to when votes were going to get scheduled and unfortunately it now looks that the votes are going to he has to be participating in votes in the Congress this afternoon and so it's not going to be able to make it today. So outside of that we believe the program will stand as it is printed and we are delighted all of you are here and we are looking forward to the day. So NHGRI and genomics we're having this party we're celebrating it by Marveline at the past and then anticipating the future. What I am convinced the speakers are going to tell you from this podium today and think about and provide you a perspective is looking back on ten years ago how sort of the science seemed to change when we generated that first sequence to the human genome and what a remarkable decade has been that now has created a bright new future at this moment in time but more importantly I know what we're going to hear from them is the future as depicted by our iconic figure in a particular focusing on the next decade and then beyond and I expect that you're going to enjoy when you hear what they have to say and in thinking about this incredible set of challenges we have but also these incredible opportunities. I wanted to just tell you a few more things about this symposium. The first thing is that we have a dedicated website genome.gov backflash symposium 2011 it will have many relevant links if you want to go back and see all sorts of things will be posting on there it is also a place that people are going to be accessing this because we are video casting this live and we expect actually many many people to be watching this live and so all of you who are remote welcome but we will also be video archiving all of the talks so I wanted to and by the way for those of you who are watching if you're interested in the program that was handed out we actually have a PDF now up on this website you can quickly download and get even more information about the speakers and so forth for all of you or you have colleagues that may want to watch these talks after the fact we expect to have many many visitors after the fact looking at our video you just go to this website and we will have all the relevant links to get you to all the video archives afterwards. In addition we love to have increasing numbers of youthful energetic young scientists and others and their culture is to blog and so we have associated with this symposium blog which either you can access by once again going to the symposium website or this is the more direct URL to the blog actually I was told by my staff it's technically not a blog it's a micro blog and I constantly ask my staff what's the difference between a blog and a micro blog and they always tell me a micro blog is smaller I don't really understand what that means but apparently we're a micro blog we're not a blog and you can join in and when we've done this previously and we do this for lots of our meetings now it is amazing how many bloggers are out and I know there's some of you in the audience in fact I can see a couple right now I know who actively be blogging all day. I will also tell you that in addition to these remote participants on this blogging we've also had a little bit of outreach last evening we had a wonderful evening to kick off sort of a restivities for today down to the Koshland Museum Science Museum we had a science cafe and downtown D.C. Amy McGuire and Amy Harmon who are two of the speakers of being featured today came in early and I emcee this event and at this event we brought in Middle School and then there's Carly Easter who was our organizer who helped facilitate all this and we had Middle School and High School science educators and some students come down and we sat and talked to them and answered questions and really had a stimulating discussion for a couple hours downtown to kick off these celebratory events. In closing cannot tell you what a fantastic staff we have at NHGRI and without them we'd never be able to pull up strategic planning processes and great publications and symposium and events like this I just want to acknowledge them I just want to show you of course we had a great organizing committee chaired by Chris Wetterstrand and Alice Vance, Carla Judy Annette, Julie, Larry and Susan thank you all very much we have I think the best medical illustrated graphics artist probably in the world as far as I'm concerned Darryl Asia and all of these various images you're seeing in the paper and up here and on the website are all his creation with help from Jay Lattman so thanks to Darryl and others for those contributions and then we had lots of activity around our lots of videos that are going to be shown and talked about and the website and the blog and these individuals listed here Janine, Maggie, Jane, Alvaro, Ben, Jeff, Raymond, Zaynep, Omar, Judy, McCool and Larry Thompson who directs all of these individuals with head of our communications and all a big thank you for that. And so finally I'm going to just tell you a couple more logistics. First thing we are going to attempt to have a brief question and answers after each speaker if we run out of time we're going to have to skip the question answer but if people want to ask questions or the microphones that are in the aisles in particular because there's people listening in remote and they want to be able to hear your question. During the breaks today the morning break, the lunch break and then the afternoon break we'll be showing some videos that our communications team put together some new interviews. The morning break will be focused on the use of genomic technologies and basic science. The lunch break will be a historic perspective of the 50 years between the discovery of the double helix and the completion of the human genome project. The afternoon break will be focused on clinical applications of genomic sciences. I'm going to chair the morning session and Mark Geier who is director of our extramural program and was a key partner with me of getting this strategic plan across the finish line will be chairing the afternoon session and by the way at lunch when you get your food you can bring your food back in here and watch the video so it's going to just like being at Disney all day we're just going to overwhelm you with lots of activities but that's a good thing and then you can all go home and rest. So with that I will close and the other thing is we are going to have incredibly brief introductions of our speakers not because we don't have great respect for them but we figure you'd rather hear them speak than to have us up here basically read their bios which are all available and printed nicely in the program. So I will simply introduce the next speaker.