 I want to start off by reminding you that the open session of this council meeting is being webcast live, and in addition, as is now our routine, the open session of all meetings of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research will be videotaped and will be made available as a permanent archive on the web, and that includes both the videos of the presentations themselves as well as various associated documents. Now for new members of council and also for new web viewers of our council meetings, I just want to make you aware that there's an electronic resource associated with my director's report. It's analogous to a supplemental materials often made available with a published paper and can be accessed at the URL shown on the slide. And the slides that I'm using for my director's report are also available electronically at the site, both as a PDF and also as a PowerPoint file. Now for slides that are associated with specific documents or relevant websites, there's a document number indicated in the bottom right which then references materials which you can then access at the website shown here. And so in addition to the video archive that I mentioned earlier, this web page and all the link documents will be archived on NHGRI's website, genome.gov, as a permanent historic resource. Well there's going to be multiple other presentations during the open session of this council and my director's report is tailored around these presentations so I'll not discuss in detail the topics that others will be covering later. And specifically in the open session later we will have an update on the genomic medicine working group by Rex Chisholm and Terry Minolio. And we will then have three workshop reports that have happened, meetings that have occurred since the last council meeting. There was a workshop on establishing a central resource of data from genome sequencing projects, at least a Brooks will tell you about, a workshop on sequencing and cohort studies and large sample collections that Terry Minolio will tell you about, and a workshop on integrating functional data for connecting genotype to phenotype that Adam Falzenfeld will tell you about. We will have one project update, an update on the GWAS catalog by Lucia Hindorf. And then Mark Geyer, the deputy director of the institute is going to give you an update on NHGRI and its role in the NIH Common Fund, in particular its leadership role for a number of programs to give you sort of a broad view of our involvement in helping with the Common Fund efforts. At this council meeting we will be considering one concept clearance on family history implementation in the challenging setting of routine clinical care that will be presented by Anastasia Wise. Late this afternoon at four o'clock we will aim to have this, in fact it will happen at four o'clock. We're going to have an update on the intramural research program. This council hears about our intramural research program roughly every year. And so we'll start off by having an update from our scientific director, the student Dan Kaster, who directs our intramural research program. Dan could have given this presentation to a counselor two ago. I purposely delayed it because the intramural program was undergoing a once in a decade review called a blue ribbon panel review. And we're going to hear the final report from that blue ribbon panel review. Rick Myers represented the council on that panel and will be giving the presentation, but he will also be joined by David Page, who will be coming in by telephone. And David Page chaired the blue ribbon panel. So that's what we have in store for us for open session. But first my director's report. And for the rest of my director's report I'm going to cover these seven areas because I have found these to provide a very nice framework for reviewing the topics that are important to go through. And I'll start off with the general NHGRI updates. But in doing so I want to tell you that the most important update about NHGRI that I have to tell you today comes in the form of an official announcement. And while the process that got us to that announcement from concept to final approval has taken well over a year, I'm pleased to announce today that my proposed reorganization of NHGRI has been approved and will be implemented on October 1 of this year. In fact in precisely three weeks. Earlier this morning NHGRI issued a press release about this announcement, that press release and various other information about the reorganization is available at this URL. Genome.gov backslash reorg. Because of its importance to NHGRI I thought I would spend the first part of my director's report reviewing the key details about the NHGRI reorganization. At the present time and really for the past roughly 19 years NHGRI has had a relatively simple structure consisting of an office of the director, a division of extramural research and division of intramural research. Within the current office of the director with three smaller offices the office of administrative management, the office of policy communications and education and the office of population genomics. Now keep in mind that in the case of the division of extramural research this structure was put into place entirely to support the human genome project. But over the past nine years in particular NHGRI's extramural research program has grown substantially both in overall size and in the diversity of its scope. So based on knowledge from being the NHGRI director for nearly three years I will soon implement a new structure for our extramural research program, one properly aligned with the strategic vision for genomics research that we published in nature in February 2011 and one that I think better configures us for our ongoing and our future research agenda. So my plans for reorganizing NHGRI aimed at making major changes to our extramural research program, some minor changes to the components of the office of the director and essentially no changes to our intramural research program. Now the new organizational structure for NHGRI which takes effect on October one will grow the number of divisions within the institute from the current two to a set of seven. Specifically the office of administrative management will be elevated to division status and be called the division of management. Similarly the office of policy communications and education will be elevated to become the division of policy communications and education. Those two new divisions will thus form from elements previously in the office of the director. Meanwhile the office of population genomics will dissolve and name but the elements of which will be incorporated into the extramural research program as you will see shortly. The division of intramural research will not change as part of this reorganization. The most substantial aspect of the reorganization will be the creation of four new divisions that together will include NHGRI's extramural research program. The division of genome sciences will oversee basic genomics research and technology development. The division of genomic medicine will promote the institute's effort to advance the application of genomics to medical science and clinical care. The current office of population genomics will be subsumed into this new division. The division of genomics in society will be responsible for an expanded program related to the many societal issues relevant to genomics research incorporating and extending the activities of this institute's ethical, legal and social implications are LC research program and working to integrate the many NHGRI wide activities in these areas. Finally the division of extramural operations will manage the myriad operational aspects of the institute's extramural research program including scientific reviews and grants management. So in the end, NHGRI will consist of seven divisions, each with a division director that will report to me as NHGRI director. In this way the extramural research program will no longer have a single director as it has since its inception. Rather the four division directors of the extramural divisions will serve as a collective leadership team working closely with me and the NHGRI deputy director Dr. Mark Geyer in leading the extramural research program. Now getting to this announcement today has not been particularly fast because there were a number of specific steps that had to be followed to reorganize the institute as proposed. Specifically we followed the guidance given in the NIH reform act of 2006 in terms of the process for carrying out such a reorganization. As some of you may recall this involved holding two public meetings during which we detailed our proposed reorganization, answered questions and took feedback from participants. The first of these was held as a webinar on January 18th the second as part of the meeting of this council on February 13th Following those public meetings we put together a final reorganization package and submitted it to NIH leadership in late February. Upon receiving NIH approval the NIH leadership in turn sought the approval of the Department of Health and Human Services. In fact Secretary Kathleen Sebelius herself signed off on our reorganization in late June after which the Office of Management and Budget as well as the US Congress were notified. Having received no objections from those latter two groups we then actually crossed the approval finish line and this allowed us then to announce the reorganization today and then to implement the reorganization on October 1st. Now key to the success of this reorganization and indeed the future pursuits of NHGRI will be the leaders within the new structure. And so today I'm also pleased to announce my outstanding new leadership team. Now for three of the divisions there will be essentially no change. Janice Mulaney will be the director of the Division of Management just as she is now the director of the Office of Administrative Management. Dr. Laura Lyman Rodriguez will be the director of the Division of Policy Communications and Education just as she is now the director of the Office of Policy Communications and Education. And Dr. Dan Caster who you'll be meeting later today will continue to be the director of the Division of Intramural Research as he is now. The real changes occur with the four new extramural divisions. Now for three of these four divisions I have selected the directors and deputy directors, all longstanding members of the NHGRI extramural staff. Their actual appointments should take effect once we get final approvals which are expected shortly. Leading the Division of Genome Sciences will be Dr. Jeff Schloss as director and Dr. Peter Good as deputy director. Leading the Division of Genomic Medicine will be Dr. Terry Minolio as director and Brad Ozenberger as deputy director. Leading the Division of Extramural Operations will be Dr. Betty Graham as director and Dr. Rudy Pazzotti as deputy director. In the case of the Division of Genomics and Society I am formulating the plan to search for its director. Until that search is completed this division will be led on an acting basis by Dr. Mark Geyer who all of you now know of course as the institute's deputy director. Now finally to round out this reorganization I will also be making some changes in terms of senior advisors. Effective October 1 there will be three senior advisors at the institute. Dr. Jane Peterson who has long been the associate director of the Division of Extramural Research will become a senior advisor to the NHGRI office of the director. Well she will work closely with me and Dr. Geyer. Vence Bonham will be my senior advisor on genomics and health disparities and Karen Rothenberg will be my senior advisor on genomics and society. Now an issue that has frequently been discussed internally and that was raised during the public meetings related to the oversight and execution of individual extramural programs and projects in light of the new multi-divisional organization of the extramural research program. So I thought I would say a few words about our plans for this. Well the three programmatic divisions and genome sciences, genomic medicine and genomics and society will be organizationally separate. We plan to continue having programs and projects overseeing in a highly collaborative fashion in most cases involving staff from more than one division. For example our flagship genome sequencing program will draw on expertise and personnel from all three divisions. Similarly an area like computational and biology and bioinformatics will be highly relevant to all three divisions involving personnel from each of those divisions. There will be programmatic areas such as the biology of disease, one of the major domains of genomics research in the coming decade. And again this will require the involvement of staff from all three divisions. And one can imagine the same to be true for the other both current and future programs and projects. Now while the details about this intersection between programs and divisions need to be worked out in the coming months we are all fully committed to maintaining a highly collaborative and cross disciplinary nature of the NHGRI extramural program something that has set us apart for many years and that must be preserved. So in summary this is an incredibly exciting time for genomics research and I believe that NHGRI has the right strategic vision to continue leading the field as it is done for the better part of two decades. Implementing this new organizational structure is an important step in NHGRI's growth and evolution and one that will better position the institute to pursue our expanded mission and also to deliver on our exciting strategic vision for genomics. So that's the official announcement I wanted to make and now I will return to the remaining portions of my director's report. So at the May Council meeting we announced a new collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to develop an exhibition on genomics and the human genome. That exhibition will open in 2013 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project as well as the 60th anniversary of Watson and Crick's discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. The roughly 2,500 square foot high tech high intensity exhibition will aim to communicate the revolutionary nature of genomics and this will be augmented by a multifaceted educational and outreach programming which will include significant web development efforts. The goal of the overall initiative is to reveal and communicate the current and future implication of genomics to communities of people around the world. Now the exhibition development is moving along quite quickly passing the 35% design phase in July. The project has an advisory committee which includes Jim Evans as a representative from this council. The foundation for NIH and the National Museum of Natural History continue to raise funds for the initiative with over half of the roughly needed $5 to $6 million now in hand. At the February council meeting in 2013 I'll have much more to report about the lead up to the opening of the exhibition in June of next year as well as the broader plans that we're developing to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project's completion. While it does not happen often, NHGRI extramural program directors do on occasion retire and Elizabeth Thompson has departed NHGRI to enter into the land of retirement more accurately in her home state of Iowa. Elizabeth contributed her considerable clinical expertise and experience to the LC research program for 20 of the programs 22 years. She was the driving force behind many LC program initiatives from the successful and influential cystic fibrosis and cancer genetic studies, the research consortia of the 1990s through the current centers of excellence in LC research or SEER program. She remembered most though for her passionate support and generosity as a mentor to trainees and young investigators. We all thank Elizabeth for her many contributions to NHGRI into the field of genomics and wish her the very best in her retirement years. As you may recall, NHGRI cosponsors a policy fellowship with the American Society of Human Genetics, ASHD and each September a new fellow joins that program. The newest such fellow is Dr. Laura Coons who started in the NHGRI office of director last week. Laura comes to us from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics. She'll be working in the NHGRI policy and program analysis branch for the next four months before progressing to the next stage of a fellowship to be in a to be determined congressional office. It is notable that this month marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of the joint ASHD NHGRI fellowship program and it continues to be successful in providing a bridge for early career genetics professionals wishing to transition to careers in science policy. The last of the NHGRI updates relates to me in early August. I travel to Australia with the goal of learning more about genomics, the genomics research landscape down under. This was similar to a trip I took to India last summer and I once again found it extremely valuable to learn firsthand what other countries are doing in genomics, in particular in the applications of genomics to medicine. My trip was largely choreographed by my good friend and colleague in genomicists, Dr. Simon Foot shown here who actually recently became dean of a new medical school at McCurry University in Sydney. For me it was a five talk four city five day romp around Australia. In addition to McCurry University, I visited the Garvin Institute in Sydney, the Institute of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Importantly, I also spent a day at the National Health and Medical Research Council, the NHMRC in Canberra, which is Australia's equivalent to the NIH. There I met with Dr. Warwick Anderson, shown here who's the CEO of the NHMRC. For my discussions with Warwick and his staff, which I spent several hours with, as well as my numerous meetings with scientists throughout the week, it became very clear that Australia is very active in genomics with a vision that is similar to the U.S. about the future of genomics in medicine. Now many of you said, well I hope you saw the Outback. You got out and saw a lot of things. Well no, there was no time for seeing any sites outside of research institutions, but I admit that in a very jet lag state just off the airplane, immediately upon my arrival I snuck away to the Sydney Zoo for a few hours and took pictures, you know capturing at least a few pictures of Australian icons such as this little guy shown here. Okay, so that was where the NHGRI updates. Let me move on to NIH updates and out of respect I'll start at the top. When you start at the top, you usually talk about awards. Now Francis Collins will receive the 2012 Pro Bono Humanan Award from the Pre-Gallian Foundation. This award recognizes exemplary and innovative efforts in improving the human condition and the Foundation Board selected Francis as this year's honoree for his founding leadership of the Human Genome Project and the award will be presented at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City in October. Sticking with the Francis theme, in June Francis was featured on the cover of a popular Capitol Hill publication, CQ Weekly. Now this is not to be confused with GQ Magazine, that's a whole other story. Now it's actually quite unusual and I actually think quite good to have the NIH director prominently featured on a publication that gets considerable congressional attention. Interestingly the main thrust of the featured article was to point out how Francis is describing NIH to congressional leaders these days. Quote, not just as a powerful force in the war against disease but also as an incubator of new jobs and new products. In short he is stressing over and over again the role that the biomedical research can play in boosting the U.S. economy. It also the article went on to report how Francis is stressing at Congress that the U.S. is falling behind other countries such as China and India when it comes to medical research budgets. It quotes him as saying that since the completion of the Human Genome Project, quote, we've basically ceded leadership in genomics to other places and particularly to China. End of quote. Also worth highlighting is this editorial that Francis published in Science during the summer that stressed his views about the role of basic science in the overall NIH research enterprise. Now with much attention over the last couple of years focused on advancing NIH's clinical research and therapeutic development agenda, some have expressed concern about perceived erosion of NIH support for basic science research. So in this editorial Francis restated a strong commitment for the NIH basic science research portfolio which actually continues to garner the majority of NIH research funds. Among his many good points Francis reminded us in the editorial that quote Americans need to know that today's basic research is the engine that powers tomorrow's therapeutic discoveries. Moving on to other parts of NIH and related to NIH the foundation for NIH will soon be getting a new leader and in November Dr. Maria Ferrer will become the president of the foundation for NIH. She is currently the president of the Albert and Mary Lasker foundation a position she has held since 2008. Maria is well known to us at NIH having served as the director of the NIH office of technology transfer from 1995 to 2001. She's also an internationally recognized expert in technology commercialization as well as a strong champion for biomedical research. Many of us at NHRI look forward to working with Maria upon her arrival at the foundation. Also announced last week Dr. Janine Clayton has been appointed the new director of the NIH office on research on women's health or ORWH and also an NIH associate director for research on women's health. Dr. Clayton has served as the acting director of that office since August of 2011. Prior to this she had been the deputy director of the office. A board certified neurologist whose research interests include immune mediated diseases in the role of sex and gender in ocular health and disease Dr. Clayton served as the deputy clinical director of the National Eye Institute prior to coming to the office of research on women's health. Of great interest to NHGRI the search for a new director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, NIGMS, is active again. In fact the initial cutoff date for applications is October 1. Lori Landis who is the director of NINDS and I are co-chairing the search committee. Now because of the important collaborative opportunities between NHGRI and NIGMS we should all, and I literally mean we should all be highly motivated to identify outstanding candidates for this important NIH leadership position. So please send me any ideas you have about individuals that the search committee should contact. Again the initial deadline October 1. And similarly please encourage people you know who might be good candidates to please apply or if they have questions they can feel free to contact me directly about the position or about NIGMS. Well three working groups of the advisory committee to the NIH director recently completed their work delivering reports and recommendations to the NIH director in June. Now in all three cases significant attention is now being paid by the NIH leadership and the institute and center directors in terms of addressing the recommendations. I'm going to tell you about each of these three reports. Now the first of these is the data in informatics working group which tackled the challenges associated with scientific and administrative quote big data. That is the increasing needs in computational biology, bioinformatics, informational sciences and so forth. This is obviously an area of great interest to NHGRI and to this council. The report includes five recommendations one promote data sharing through central and federated catalogs two support the development implementation evaluation maintenance and dissemination of informatics methods and applications. Three build capacity by training the workforce and the relevant quantitative sciences such as bioinformatics, biomathematics, biostatistics and clinical informatics. And four develop an NIH wide on campus IT strategic plan. And importantly five provide a serious substantial and sustained funding commitments to enable recommendations one through four. Those who are interested the full report is available as document eight. Now as I mentioned to council previously I and others at NHGRI have been asked to take on significant leadership responsibilities with respect to developing a trans NIH plan to address these recommendations and tackle the many challenges of scientific and biomedical big data. This is now very active for us and I am certain that I'll have more to report to you in terms of our progress in trying to deal with the recommendations and developing a path forward at February council meeting. I'll have more to say about that. Now the second working group the biomedical research workforce working group was charged with developing a model for a sustainable and diverse U.S. biomedical research workforce that can inform decisions about training the optimal number of people for the appropriate types of positions that will advance science and promote health. The overall purpose of the working group recommendations is to ensure future U.S. competitiveness and innovation in biomedical research. They include specific recommendations for different stages of the career path including graduate students, postdoctoral training, staff scientists, physician scientists and faculty. The recommendations deal with length of training skill sets needed for various career options, salaries, economic and educational drivers, diversity which is actually mainly addressed in a different working group that I'll tell you about in a minute and the coordination of training, information collection analysis and dissemination and advice for increasing specific funding programs already being supported by NIH. Again the full report if you're interested is available as document 8. And then the third working group the working group on diversity and biomedical research workforce was formed to look more deeply into the issues raised in the 2011 publication by Ginther et al. on race, ethnicity and NIH research awards which reported poor success rates for extramural applicants from underrepresented groups. The working group was charged with analyzing the NIH intramural and extramural research community's retention of underrepresented minorities, persons with disabilities and persons from disadvantaged backgrounds in the biomedical research workforce. They were asked to focus on five key transition points in scientific careers. In the end the working group gave NIH 13 recommendations to enhance the diversity of the biomedical workforce. Three of those recommendations just as examples were to one enhance data collection and evaluation of training program outcomes, two to strengthen mentoring and career preparation of retention programs and three to conduct pilot interventions with outcomes monitoring. And again the full report of this is available as document 8. Moving on then, you may recall that just over two years ago NIH was blocked from funding any human embryonic stem cell research as a result of a court case brought about by Drs. James Shirley and Teresa Dysher against the DHHS Secretary Sebelius and the NIH. The injunction against NIH funding embryonic stem cell research was lifted by the appeals court when Judge Royce Lambert found in favor of the NIH in July of 2011. In late August of this year the court of appeals considered the case and also ruled in favor of DHHS and NIH hopefully bringing this case to a close. Moving on to next year's appropriations in July, Senate and House leaders announced an agreement on a continuing resolution that will fund the government and keep it running through March of next year. Legislation will still need to be passed this month to make this handshake agreement a reality, but it therefore looks like we're likely going to not know until spring at the earliest what NIH's and NHRI's fiscal year 2013 appropriation will be and that the final decision will be made by the next Congress, not the current one. Now the appropriations committees in Congress had previously been working on legislation allocating fiscal year 2013 funds for NIH and NHRI as shown on this table. In July the House Labor HHA subcommittee approved a bill that said NHGRI's fiscal year 2013 funding at $512 million. One month earlier the Senate appropriations committee approved a bill setting our funding marginally higher at $513 million. Since the regular congressional appropriations process will not be completed until the next Congress is unclear how these bills will translate into final appropriations for NIH or NHRI. So as expected with the pending election we know very little about what our funding will be for the fiscal year that starts in about three weeks. Speaking of Capitol Hill on July 21st, Francis Collins testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health at a hearing entitled the National Institutes of Health, the review of its reforms, priorities and progress. The oversight hearing did not focus on a major issue of concern of the committee but rather touched on a wide range of topics. These included the implementation of the 2006 NIH Reform Act, the progress of NCATS, and the determination of NIH funding and research priorities. Moving on then to genomics updates. We'll start with an award. So NHRI grantee Steve Quake was awarded the 2012 Lemelson-MIT Prize for Biomedical Discoveries and Commercialization of Inventions Revolutionizing Human Health. He was recognized for his invention of microfluidic chips that have miniature pumps and valves that incorporate complex fluid handling steps to speed genomics research. It's always fun to embarrass a council member, so we'll do that here. Amy McGuire, a council member, and also an NHRI LC grantee and a human microbiome project grantee, was recently named the new director of Baylor College of Medicine's Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy. Amy has served on the Baylor College of Medicine faculty since 2004 and is Associate Director of Research for the Center since 2009, and her research focuses on legal and ethical issues in genomics. Congratulations Amy. Joanne Boffman, who's here to my right, announced in June that she'll soon be leaving the American Society of Human Genetics, ASHG, where she has served as Executive Vice President since 2001, and Joanne's going to become the Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University System of Maryland. Now because of Joanne's leadership at ASHG, NHRI has developed an outstanding collaborative relationship with the society in innumerable ways over the past decade. Joanne has also served as the ASHG liaison to the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research for many years. ASHG is advertising for her successor, and applicants can submit their name to the ASHG website, and the deadline for such a submission is September 15th, but I won't change slides until I personally thank Joanne for the wonderful relationship we've had with her and for all the contribution she's made to genetics and genomics, and we wish her the very best in her new position. As we may recall from the February and May council meetings, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues has been considering bioethics issues raised by advances in human genome sequencing. The Commission is focusing on issues related to access to and individual privacy protection for genetic information with a focus on large-scale human genome sequence data. The Commission will address and provide recommendations regarding these issues in a report due to be published in October. The Commission has gathered information for its report through a request for information, and through a survey of federal agencies on their relevant statutes, regulations, guidance documents and policies. The Commission also held a series of public meetings, the most recent of which was held on August 1st and 2nd, where Dr. Laura Rodriguez of NHGRI presented on behalf of the NIH about privacy and other participant protection measures integral to the agency's genomic data sharing activities. NHGRI's staff remains in contact with the Commission staff, both to serve as a resource and to provide appropriate input when needed to the Commission. The lawsuit over Meriad's BRCA patents and possibly gene patents all together continues to move around the court system with the new decision announced last month. As you may recall, the case began in 2009 when several pathology societies as well as several clinical pathologists and breast cancer patients challenged the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and Meriad Genetics and the Directors of the University of Utah Research Foundation over the patentability of Meriad's BRCA-1 and BRCA-2 related patents. A couple of years ago, a federal district court ruled that Meriad's claim to BRCA Pat genes were not patent eligible and this decision was reversed by the Court of Appeals for the federal circuit. The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court. However, in March of this year, the Supreme Court asked the Court of Appeals to reconsider the case in light of another long-standing biomedical patent dispute between Prometheus and Mayo laboratories. The Court of Appeals has now issued a new ruling coming to the same conclusions as before with the majority finding that Meriad's claim to the isolated BRCA genes were still patent eligible. The case is now expected to be appealed back to the Supreme Court once again, thus the depiction of Lego men playing ping-pong. NHGRI continues to feature a genome advance the month on our website genome.gov. Publications that were featured since the last council meeting described research addressing genetic and epigenetic changes in cancer cells, manipulation of DNA to form useful shapes, results of the human microbiome project, and the genomics of aging. And as always, genomics was featured in many new stories over the past four months. For example, the press really enjoyed reporting about the sequencing of the banana genome. As you can see from the headline, quote, a smart bunch of scientists unpeel banana's genome, and to quote, the study actually discovered several genes that might be involved in pest resistance and ripening. The new scientists published a piece about the use of exome sequencing to uncover the genetic causes of rare diseases both before and after the detection of symptoms. The genome-wide association study published by Nature identified a genetic variant in multiple sclerosis patients associated with a negative response to drugs commonly used to treat other autoimmune diseases. But those stories were really just warm-up acts for a significant amount of attention paid to genomics in recent months, and in fact even today, by the New York Times. For example, Gina Kalana authored a three-part series looking into the use of genomics in diagnosing and treating cancer. Part one addressed work done to uncover the genetic basis of the case of acute adult-acute lymphoblastic leukemia using exome and RNA sequencing. They discovered that a normal gene was an overdrive producing a protein that appeared to spur the cancer's growth. As a result, the treatment was identified that put the patient into remission. Part two of the series described the experience of a patient with a rare T-cell lymphoma who underwent whole genome sequencing. The results indicated that her cancer was driven by a strange gene aberration that could be attacked with a new drug approved for melanoma. While the patient eventually succumbed to the disease, this treatment seemed to have halted or reversed the patient's cancer for a few weeks illustrating the potential power of this kind of approach. Part three described the use of a genomic test that predicts the outcome of patients with ocular melanoma. The test assesses the activity of 12 genes associated with the disease, the results of which can identify those patients that are likely to respond well to treatment. And just last month, another piece in the New York Times described the work of Dr. Ed Marcott and colleagues who used human yeast comparative genomic analyses to identify drugs potentially applicable to the treatment of cancer. And because of their shared evolutionary history, they found that an antifungal drug that affects cell wall development in yeast can be used to inhibit the growth of blood vessels in human tumors. So moving beyond genomics and specifically to the NHGRI extramural research program, and it seems appropriate to start with our genome sequencing program. Recall that there are four components of the recently renewed NHGRI genome sequencing program. The large-scale genome sequencing and analysis centers, centers for Mendelian genomics, clinical sequencing exploratory research projects, and informatics tools for high throughput sequence data analysis. Each of these components will be discussed further in the following slides, but it's worth noting that for the first time, participants in all four of these components will be having a face-to-face meeting in October. In addition to the necessary housekeeping tasks, we hope that the attendees of this meeting will pursue shared goals and discuss common obstacles and engage directly about their different scientific objectives. We're starting off with the large-scale genome sequencing analysis centers. They're undertaking numerous projects, mostly related to complex disease and cancer. Notably in February, the Obama administration announced new efforts to fight Alzheimer's disease, including making an additional $50 million of existing NIH funds available for cutting-edge Alzheimer's disease research. Accounting for half of those funds, the large-scale genome sequencing analysis centers program is in the late planning stages for a significant Alzheimer's disease genome sequencing project in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging and its grantees. In the most recent quarter, the three centers in this program produced an impressive 57-terra bases that's trillion bases of sequence data. Also worth noting are a number of publications emanating from these centers since the last council meeting, including those related to cancer, autism, rare diseases, human microbiome, clinical sequencing, and methods and reference development. And ongoing projects are focused on cancer, complex diseases, rare diseases, and comparative sequencing. Specifically, emphasizing cancer, of course, all these centers are involved in the cancer genome atlas, TCGA, which now has data available on 22 different tumor types, and major progress has been made with respect to publishing their results. A TCGA paper reporting work to analyze colorectal carcinoma was published this summer in nature. Notable findings included the observation that colon carcinomas and rectal carcinoma are not distinct diseases, at least with respect to the results of genomic analyses. Confirmation of the involvement of mixed signaling in these cancers was also reported as well were numerous amplifications of the PI3 kinase pathway genes, which suggest potential therapeutic targets. A TCGA paper about lung squamous cell carcinoma was released online by Nature yesterday. This report reveals why therapeutic strategies used for the more common lung adenocarcinoma often fail for squamous cell disease. A much different spectrum of tyrosine kinase regulars were found to be mutated in the squamous cell carcinomas, pointing to new options for directed therapy targeting these regulators. I'd point out driving in this morning, listening to the radio, listening to the news, this was one of the featured stories. It was this report, and indeed they talked about in New York Times article, back Gina Clota has an article that came out today reporting the results in this paper. Again, the drumbeat of good stories about genomics continues in the media. A paper describing TCGA analysis of breast carcinoma will also be published soon, and several other manuscripts are in preparation, including those reporting studies of kidney clear cell carcinoma and acute myeloid leukemia. This last study is being led by council member Rick Wilson. Registration recently opened for the second annual TCGA scientific symposium which will be held on November 27th and 28th in Crystal City, Virginia. Following the success of the first such symposium last November, this meeting will feature talks on the ongoing TCGA tumor projects. They'll include hands-on sessions on how to access and use the TCGA data, multiple poster sessions, and the opportunity to interact with investigators generating TCGA data sets. Also involving the three large sequencing centers, progress continues on the thousand genomes project to sequence the genomes of a large number of people thereby providing a comprehensive resource on human genetic variation. The thousand genomes project analysts are now working on the development of methods for identifying variants, especially indels and other structural variants, and integrating them on haplotypes. These new methods will be used to analyze the final data set of about 2,500 samples from 25 populations, which should be generated by December and which should then be analyzed next year. But meanwhile, the phase one paper, which characterizes the variation in the first 1,092 samples from 14 populations will be published in early November. In fact, it will be published in time for the ASHG meeting. Moving on to the next component of our sequencing program, the three centers for Mendelian genomics at the University of Washington, Yale, and Johns Hopkins Baylor aim to discover the genetic basis of as many Mendelian disorders as possible. This program is co-funded by NHGRI and NHLBI. More than 100 Mendelian diseases have been selected so far and appropriate samples have been or are being sequenced and analyzed by the three centers. A number of disease genes have already been identified with some papers reporting these discoveries already submitted or are in preparation. The American Journal of Medical Genetics recently published a commentary describing the goals of this program. The commentary states quote, the centers for Mendelian genomics will provide exome and whole genome sequencing and extensive analysis expertise at no cost to collaborate investigators where the causal gene or genes from Mendelian phenotype have yet to be uncovered. Over the next few years in a collaboration with the global human genetics community, the centers for Mendelian genomics hope to facilitate the identification of genes underline a very large fraction of all Mendelian disorders, end of quote. To accomplish this, joint sample solicitation is taking place for all three centers, coordinated through a single web portal at mendelian.org which has started receiving samples now. And finally the centers have organized an educational program focusing on Mendelian genomics at the 2012 ASHG meeting which takes place in November. The third component of our sequencing program is the clinical sequencing exploratory research projects or in other words known as the CESAR projects and they're now up and running and the consortium of CESAR groups will be expanding. There was a strong response to the reissued RFA for the CESAR program and these applications will go to study section this fall and then will be discussed at the February council meeting. Recognizing the relevance of this area for their institutes, NCI and NIDA, the Drug Abuse Institute have tentatively agreed to support awards relevant to their missions. You will recall that NCI co-funded two awards in the first round of CESAR projects. Applications will also receive for coordination center to assist both the CESAR consortium but also the return of results consortium. We anticipate that this coordinating center will have a crucial function in disseminating the important findings and best practices coming out of the two consortium. And the fourth and final component of our sequencing program recall that a new component consisted of a network of grantees involved in developing informatics tools for high throughput sequence data analysis. This IC tools network as it's called robust and reliable analysis tools that are researcher friendly. The six funded IC tools projects are now out of the gates and already making advances in building better tools across the stages of the software life cycle from prototype to hardened. This includes building more robust software with important new features, building user interfaces and better engineering. There will also be the establishment of more user support documentation outreach in new community forums and portals. These useful analysis tools are being linked in workflows to simplify their use. Software will be re-engineered to be more efficient and to do more with less compute and memory. New cloud and virtual machine approaches are also being piloted. So stay tuned for more updates on this program at future council meetings. Well, last week was an insanely good week for the ENCODE consortium with an impressive flurry of publications and an avalanche of press coverage. Specifically ENCODE was featured on the cover of and throughout the September 6th issue of nature, including the consortium's main integrative paper and also a supplementary poster shown there. In addition, there were 29 other ENCODE papers published last week in Nature Genome Research Genome Biology plus additional papers in Science, Cell and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. These papers add to the greater 150 papers already published as a result of funding for this phase of ENCODE. Nature has developed four publishing innovations for these ENCODE publications. These include one, threads that connect findings by themes across the various papers. Two, interactive figures that allow researchers to click on figures and then drill down to see additional findings. Three, virtual machines that allow computational scientists to view detailed materials and methods. And of course four, an iPad app. How can we not have an app? It contains all the papers from the package across all the different publishing houses and also all the above add-ins. Well congratulations to the ENCODE consortium and to the NHGRI ENCODE program staff for these remarkable contributions. But they did not go unnoticed and shown here is just a sampling of the press coverage. You can see in some high profile press quite an impressive set of articles. I'm only showing you four of about 40 such articles that were written about ENCODE last week. Now the model organism encyclopedia of DNA elements or MODENCODE project aim to use a variety of experimental and computational approaches to catalog all the parts of the fruit fly and worm genomes that play a role in biological processes. And as this is the final year of the project, NHGRI held a special symposium at NIH in June to celebrate MODENCODE accomplishments. After symposium, MODENCODE consortium however showcased their findings and highlighted the power of model organism to enhance understanding fundamental biological processes including the biology of disease. The symposium was a great success and videos and slides for all the talks are available on NHGRI's Genome TV channel of YouTube. In terms of programmatic aspects of the ENCODE project, our focus has now been on launching the third phase of the project. For this three ENCODE RFAs were issued in October 2011 to support research projects that applied high-throughput cost-efficient approaches to extend ENCODE resources towards this complete catalog as feasible awards for this next round of grants will be made by the end of September. And finally, publication of cross-species analyses are being planned for the MODENCODE and mouse ENCODE consortia. One set involves integrating wound fly and human data and the other involves comparisons of human and mouse data. There was a strong response to the new SEER today for specialized center P-50 and exploratory center P-20 applications with applications received in July. Our current plans are to fund two P-50 and two P-20 applications. Those applications will be reviewed this fall and will then be discussed at the February council meeting. The eighth annual SEER investigators meeting and trainee workshop will be held here, I mean literally in this room here on October 15th to 17th. Panel discussions will include an examination of the transition of LC research to policy, the evolution of transdisciplinary LC research, sustaining SEER training activities, and a discussion of late-breaking legal and intellectual property developments. Over the past few months NHGRI has issued four RFAs in the area of genomic medicine that are worth highlighting. The genomic medicine pilot demonstration projects RFA for study sites and coordinating center, which had a receipt date of July 19th. The population architecture using genomics and epidemiology page, phase two RFA for study sites and coordinating center, which had a receipt date of October 18th. And the clinically relevant genetic variance resource RFA, which had a receipt date of October 23rd. And finally, the genomic sequencing and newborn screening disorders RFA, which is cosponsored by NHGRI and NICHD and has a receipt date of November 19th. Finally, some NHGRI meetings that I've not already mentioned include the SAG's annual grantee meeting, which will be held at the University of North Carolina in October. And at the 2012 ASHC meeting, which I've already mentioned several times, ENCODE and the Common Fund Epigenomics Program will be holding a joint outreach tutorial on November 9th that aims to teach participants how to use their data resources to understand genetic variation and human disease. And speaking of the NIH Common Fund, let me give you some updates about Common Fund programs and projects, starting off with Molecular Libraries Program, MLP. Molecular Libraries Program is now in the fifth year of its production phase. This is actually the eighth year of the program overall, which represents its penultimate year. As such, the ramp down in funding has started and the network has been reduced to five centers. A total of five comprehensive and specialized chemistry centers remain, which will be funded at reduced levels next year. The BioAssay Research Database, or BARD, Envision is both a repository for MLP assay data and an analysis tool for the broader community is under development by a team comprising multiple participating institutions. Public beta release of this tool is scheduled for this spring. And while the primary mission of probe development continues, the network is also planning for transition as the program ends after year six of the production phase in a little over a year. So program staff is working with center PIs and assay providers to identify routes for future institute and center-based support. And a coordinated effort is also underway to define the legacy of the program through a high impact network publication. Moving on to the Human Microbiome Project, the Human Microbiome Project reached an important milestone similar to what the Human Code had last week with a flurry of publications. In their case, these publications happened in June. Particularly Nature published two major consortium papers and featured this on their cover, shown here. And at the same time, 18 associated papers came out as an open access PLOS collection. Among the findings reported, researchers were surprised to discover that the distribution of microbial metabolic activities matters more than the species of microbes providing them. In the healthy gut, for example, there's always a population of bacteria needed to digest fats, but it may not always be the same bacterial species carrying out this function. Meanwhile, several papers in the PLOS collection reported medical results. For example, researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine examined changes in the vaginal microbiome associated with pregnancy, while researchers at the Washington University in St. Louis examined the nasal microbiome of children with unexplained fevers, a common problem in children under the age of three. The set of HMP papers retrieved an extensive amount of press coverage once again, due in part to the excellent efforts once again of NHGRI's communication team. Coverage included articles run by multiple wire services, including APN Reuters, and over a dozen dailies, including Boston Globe, LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, by multiple international outlets, science publications, and business magazines, as well as an appearance by me on the PBS News Hour. On Twitter, the hashtag microbiome reached 74,000 within hours of the news announcement. I guess that's good. Meanwhile, there was a late-breaking session on these microbiome publications at the American Society of Microbiology meeting in June. The knockout mouse phenotyping project, COMP 2, is in the second phase of an initiative that aims to create a public resource comprised of phenotype mice containing a null mutation for every gene in the mouse genome. In five years COMP 2 aims to make and phenotype 2,500 live mouse strains from knockout ES cells. COMP 2 awards were made in fiscal year 2011, with overall funding for the program being $111 million over five years. Three centers proposing paired mouse production and mouse phenotyping applications were ultimately funded. The graph shown here shows program projects to date. Note that the early phase has emphasized the generation of the mouse strains themselves, following micro-injection, which was mostly on track. The phenotyping of those mice kicks in later this year, so we'll start tracking the goals of this component, which are shown in pink in the near future. The Genotype Tissue Expression, or G-TEX project, was approved for a scale-up with money from the Common Fund, and that approval came in May of this year. So there will now be two and a half years of active enrollment with 25 to 30 tissue samples collected from each postmortem donor. With these additional funds, G-TEX now aims by 2016 to generate an ultimate resource involving 900 postmortem donors with associated clinical or histopathological information who will be fully genotyped. Gene expression levels will be measured by RNA-Seq for greater than 20,000 tissue samples collected from 30 organs. These data are being released through quarterly DBGAP data releases. The resource will also provide access to stored samples through an RFA scheduled for 2014. And G-TEX also includes an ELSI study of the donor families. The NIH protein capture reagents program held a productive teleconference with its external scientific panel this past July to provide a program update. The NIH particularly sought guidance from the panel for improving the capacity of the antigen production center. Based on the feedback from this meeting, we submitted a half a million dollar supplement request to boost antigen production and this request was approved by the comment fund. So the three production centers continue to work collaboratively to exchange technology and protocol ideas to generate the best possible products and anticipated that this extra funding will restore the antigen production pipeline and keep the affinity centers on course to achieve their production milestones. The three production centers will be site visited in February by NIH staff and external scientific panel members to assess progress. Finally, a website is now live on the comment fund protein capture page as an outreach effort to seek public comment on a priority list of human transcription factor targets for production of a renewable affinity reagents. Moving on to Human Heredity in Health in Africa, H3Africa project. This program has been busy preparing for its official launch. The NIH and the Welcome Trust awards were released in August. With those awards now announced, there will be an inaugural meeting of the H3Africa consortium in Ethiopia in October. The meeting will bring together over 40 African scientists representing more than 10 countries. At that meeting, we will have the official press announcement of the NIH and Welcome Trust awards. Also at that meeting, we have presentations by the new grantees as well as discussions about various H3Africa policies such as data release, resource sharing and consent and funding the H3A bio net, the bioinformatics network and the H3Africa biorepositories. Now that the program is underway, an independent expert committee has been assembled to advise the program. That new group will be comprised of scientific experts from the UK from the United States and from Africa and will be co-chaired by Barry Bloom as the NIH representative and Kay Davies as the Welcome Trust representative. Council members Rex Chisholm and Carlos Bustamante have also agreed to serve on the independent expert committee thanks to both of them. The H3Africa program continues to expand a new FOA for the H3Africa ELSI program was released in June and FOAs for H3Africa collaborative centers research projects and bio repositories were reissued in August. Getting H3Africa off the ground has not been a simple process involved a tremendous amount of work, a collective effort of many people across NIH with a particular concentration of those people at NHGRI and in a recent ceremony Francis Collins honored those people by giving an NIH directors award award in the area of global help to a group that included the core team of individuals that have made H3Africa a reality. Well in the last common fund program I want to tell you about is something I've told you a lot about in the past and in multiple directors reports over the last two years I've spoken about the NIH undiagnosed diseases program or UDP. Founded by NHGRI's clinical director Bill Gall this trans-NIH program has been highly successful and also highly acclaimed. Run out of the NIH clinical center within the NIH intramural research program since 2008 the UDP aims to assist patients with unknown disorders reach an accurate diagnosis and also to discover new diseases that provide insight into human pathology and genetics. The program has served as a referral of last resort if you will for patients whose conditions have failed to yield a diagnosis. In terms of numbers the UDP has received 6,500 inquiries to date it's reviewed 2,300 medical records and then accepted about 500 patients for further study. A definitive diagnosis has been reached for about 39 patients with rare diseases and 16 new human genetic disorders have been identified. So far the UDP has been a pilot program with funding committed only through this fiscal year and after months of discussing and debating the best long term funding arrangement for this obviously important and valuable program NIH leadership decided to move the UDP into the NIH common fund. So starting in fiscal year 13 in other words on October 1 of this year the UDP will be a common fund program. Not surprisingly NHGRI has been asked to play the major role in overseeing this new common fund program since it had existed in our intramural program administratively and programmatically up until now. So I've been designated the co-lead along with Story Landis from NINDS and Steve Goff of the Office of Rare Diseases Research. In its new configuration Bill Gaul will continue to lead an intramural UDP effort in fact that existing program will play a pivotal central role in a planned expansion to create a national UDP network. That network is envisioned as adding roughly six new extramural sites, groups that would build on the foundation created to date by the intramural site. In creating such a network data storage access and analysis will be improved and expanded and there will be plans for training and fellowship programs for rare disease diagnostics. We'll have many things to discuss with council at future meetings but immediate next steps to make you aware of include an active request for information to solicit information about this expanding UDP program. There will also be an investigator webinar and then a public webinar in the coming weeks to gain more input about these exciting new plans. So that's what I want to tell you about the common fund when we move now on to the Office of the Director. The Genomics in Medicine lecture series a collaboration between NHGRI's Suburban Hospital in Bethesda and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has been a success and has now been extended through January 2013. As you may recall each presentation is a grand round style, some of them are covering topics in genomic medicine. Dr. Gene Passimani is now leading the planning committee for this series and these talks occur the first Friday of each month or the next one is being given by Max Munker of NHGRI on November 2nd and shown here are some of the additional speakers for future talks into 2013. Importantly for those who are not local all of these talks are being videotaped and made available on NHGRI's Genome TV channel of YouTube. Last month NHGRI held the 2012 summer workshop in genomics otherwise known as the short course. This year's participants included 28 biology and nursing school faculty and pre-doctoral students from two and four year colleges. Participants came from diverse universities and colleges across the country as always the lectures were provided by researchers and staff from across NHGRI. Major effort was made to develop a unique experience for each group who attended the workshop for example nursing faculty had the opportunity to learn more about the G2 C2 resource which I'll tell you about in a minute graduate students participated in the NHGRI summer internship program hosted a poster session and met with intramural research faculty and biology faculty participated in a bioinformatics 101 course offered by the NIH library. In June NHGRI hosted a follow-up meeting to the November 2011 meeting of stakeholders in pharmacist education. The June meeting was designed to specifically address the potential use of NHGRI developed genetics and genomics competency center G2 C2 by pharmacist researchers interested in advancing genomics education. The small group of leaders included representatives from the major professional and educational organizations. A commitment emerged to use the G2 C2 tool by the organizations in addition there was a commitment by the organizations to evaluate and revising current competencies for genomics education which included establishing a committee to review the competencies included in the accreditation process for schools of pharmacy to go and update in 2013. Gene Jenkins will be taking over for Greg Fero's leadership of this effort going forward. Speaking of Greg Fero, in June Greg Fero co-chaired an institute of medicine genomic medicine round table meeting and assessing the economics of genomic medicine. Specifically the meeting explored the economics of integrating whole genome sequencing and clinical care. This event was a sequel to a 2011 meeting that explored the full spectrum of issues facing the introduction of genomic data into healthcare. The meeting used three case vignettes spanning a period of time in a patient's life to explore how clinical care might change with the availability of genome sequencing data. Stakeholders represented the perspectives of a provider of a researcher and a patient were asked to discuss how having sequence information might affect healthcare delivery. In the end, several major needs were identified and those included the need for formal methods for valuing personal utility of genome sequences, the need for scalable economics evaluation methods for large number of variants in genes, and the need for more robust outcomes research for modeling economic scenarios. The proceedings of the workshop will be published over the next few months. Another meeting in June, NHGRI convened a meeting to get input for genetics and genomic nursing competency initiative group. The aim of this gathering was to review available evidence of whether or not nurses who incorporate genomic information in practice make a difference in patient outcomes. The meeting concluded there was minimal such evidence and so recommendations to guide nursing research were drafted and posted for public comment. These comments are now in and the next steps include a joint meeting with the leadership of the National Institute of Nursing Research to review the comments and then the publication of final recommendations in 2013. NHGRI is looking forward to the potential of building new collaborations with the National Institute of Nursing Research in this area. NHGRI very recently launched a new digital media database which is a publicly available resource. The NHGRI digital media database is an easily searchable database containing downloadable high resolution photographs, graphics, and video files related to the field of genomics research and the activities of NHGRI. These images are all in the public domain so we wanted to facilitate their use by all of you, by the community and so we developed this database and made it freely available. So we welcome you to poke around the various parts of the site and use images and videos and so forth for your talks and presentations and provide us feedback about the utility of this database. And finally let me just tell you a few things about our intramural program. You'll be hearing far more about it later in the open session. Another big media blitz a lot of good publicity, interesting publicity. The research highlight from the NHGRI intramural research program that garnered the most media attention since the last council meeting related to a paper published in Science Translational Medicine. Using the next generation genome sequencing, Julie Segre's group and the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center tracked a serious outbreak of antibiotic-resistant ClubZL pneumoniae in the NIH clinical center shown in the photograph. The novel insights provided by whole genome sequences from multiple isolates of the bacterium helped to establish wisely the path by which the infection spread in the clinical center leading to changes in some of the practices for containing such an outbreak. This was a fabulous example of genomic technologies being used in novel ways for improving the practice of medicine which is why literally dozens and dozens of news stories reported the findings. Other recent highlights from the NHGRI intramural research program included Las Pisceras Group published a study in the American Journal of Human Genetics that examined how available genome sequence data from patients can yield clinically useful information about cancer susceptibility genes. Pam Schwartzberg's group published a paper in the journal Immunity reporting the use of a mouse model of X-linked LFO proliferative syndrome to establish how a missing protein can disrupt communication between T and B cells. Their findings explain why some patients with this syndrome can encounter a fatal immune response to Epstein-Barr virus. In a collaboration with investigators at the National Institute of Mental Health Ellen Sudranski's group published a paper in the journal Brain reporting the results of a six-year study explaining how people with alterations in the gene mutated and Gossier disease are more likely to develop Parkinson's disease. And finally, and I told you there's always highlights about the undiagnosed disease program. Once again it's true and finally, you just can't go four months without something major. This time it was CBS's 60 Minutes that aired a story about the UDP correspondent Laura Logan interviewed members of the UDP team including Dr. Camilla Toro shown here in a piece they called Hard Case which was filmed entirely at the NIH Clinical Center. And with that I of course want to thank as always Chris Wetterstrand who helped pull together all these many slides and all these bits of information so I can report it to you. But also thanks to Larry Thompson, Judy Wyatt, and all the rest of the NHGRI web team and communications team who are busily doing all sorts of things to get this report out available and videotaped and available sort of as a public resource as well. So I will stop there and I'm happy to take any questions. Thanks. Questions? Okay, what about me? I need to go over. I don't know. It's a good question. He tans better than me. So we have one more thing coming up if we can get it up quickly. Should we just go on without the slide? Yeah, you might just need to improv. So well, Eric doesn't know about this, I don't think. Eric was willing to embarrass council member or two. We're willing to embarrass Eric just to add to the director's report that Eric, in July Eric was awarded the 2012 Wallace Coulter Lectureship Award by the American Association of Clinical Chemistry. This award recognizes an outstanding individual who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment to and has made important contributions that have had a significant impact on education, practice, and or research in laboratory medicine or patient care. And we want to congratulate Eric. If he's suspicious when someone's trying to load a slide I don't know about. So Eric, just a technical question. That workshop on November night where ENCODE and the epigenome are doing that, is that similar to the one where you pair up the it's not the same thing as we did? No, you're thinking of when we had ENCODE participants paired up with Geneva investigators. My understanding, although an ENCODE person can jump to a microphone, my understanding is that this is a tutorial style workshop for a typical ASA she attendee to teach them how to use the resources of ENCODE and the common fund epigenomics project data. And that really just was, I didn't think that was what it was, are you going to do something like that pairing again? Has that been discussed? I just don't remember hearing about it. So on the first question, the tutorial will be classroom style. There will be some practical going through how to access the data, how to use the data, it will be primarily lectures for the people. Do we have a plan for a follow up to the ENCODE Geneva? We don't have a plan to fan at this time but we think that was really successful and we'd be looking to those opportunities. Sure. We're always looking for ways to get people to use the data more. And expand it beyond Geneva I think, right? I mean that was the Yeah, the pairing up with Geneva that was a specific opportunity that presented itself rather than we thought that that was the most important group to target. I just wanted to ask a question, if you want to as part of the sort of common fund and also the undiagnosed diseases program, if you wanted to comment at all on the current status of the clinical center and how things are going on the intramural program in terms of that acting as a hospital and its utilization, its funding, etc. So I think that's a great question and I would be happy to take a stab at it but knowing that Dan Castner's coming here at four o'clock and we'll be talking about the clinical center and as you well know is sort of not only a champion but Dan's made his career in the clinical center. He will give a far more sophisticated answer than I can give and I think it's a better context as part of his presentation. So I can prime him but you should just ask him if I don't do that. Anything else? General questions? Comments? Okay, so we're going to sneak one more thing in here before lunch. As you will recall we form working groups of the council in areas that we want additional input about and so some, I forgot the exact date but a year or two ago we created a new working group in Genomic Medicine. We did this specifically with the new thrust of the strategic plan and we recognized that area was something we were going to be involved in. We wanted to have additional activities that would lead to input to us and so a formal working group of the council was created and we've heard about it, you've heard from RFA's but now we're going to hear an actual update about the activities of that working group. I think it's going to be a tag team event. Rex is going to start and then at some point in the middle of this presentation we're going to hand it off to Terry Monoglio.