 My own welcome to all of you. It's actually great to see all of you again. Also, it's great to see our council table filling out with more folks and especially the folks who are coming on or will be coming on. It's going to be great working with you. So I have the usual sets of things to try to cover every time. It seems that four months, you wouldn't think a lot's happened, but indeed, at least at our institute and our field, it just seems there's just remarkable amount happening. And so I want to try to highlight that. At a personal level, I should point out I'm nearing the end of my rookie year as director, only two and a half more months. With that said, can you believe it, Richard? It's two and a half more months. I ended my rookie year. And it's a little insane, I have to admit. But I actually have developed a five-step program to recover my sanity. I'm actually going to explicitly mention steps two through five during my director's report. I'll just tell you that step one is just to survive my rookie year without any major disasters or embarrassments to the institute. And two and a half more months to go. And if I can just write that one out, then I'll have fulfilled step one. But I will tell you about the other four steps as we go along. As with last time, we have really tried to enhance the information that we can distribute to you and others, who the Open Session of Council is open by definition. And so we are trying as best we can to create an electronic resource, an archival resource, associated with each of my director's reports, which really reflects the contributions of dozens of people across the institute and a collection of lots of documents that you might find useful or you may a few weeks from now say, oh, I'd love to see that press release. I'd love to get that article. Or I'd love to know about that website. So we've really organized my entire talk around this supplementary website with an easy-to-remember URL on genome.gov.backslash director's report. It stays that way until next council, and then it just gets moved into a different position with a different URL, but is all indexed relative to the date of the council meeting. So pulling this together last minute is quite frenetic, needless to say. We're figuring out a rhythm to make it happen. My personal thanks to Larry Thompson and Judy Wyatt and other members of the web team. We were doing this most of the weekend, to be honest with you. But all of my slides and all of these archival materials really will represent a permanent resource for you. In case there are things that I fly by and you want to get to, it'll all be available electronically. These are the seven things that I think are the best major categories to cover. Worked last time, so I'm going to sort of organize everything I'm going to present around these seven areas. And in fact, the other thing to recognize is that I do tailor my presentation now around what you are going to hear from others, just to make sure that we're trying to avoid redundancy. Let me just give you a preview of what's going to happen in the open session today. Besides my director's report is that there'll be three concept clearances, one on LCOgene McEwen. You will hear about the Therapeutic Surgery and Neglective Disease Program and a concept clearance that needs your involvement from Susan Old. And in an unusual circumstance, we actually need to put a concept clearance in front of you related to an intramural initiative. And you'll be hearing later from Joan Bailey Wilson. Today, you as a counsel, do for the NIH director to come visit. And so a familiar face will be showing up, we believe, at 11.30. We are tracking him by GPS. So we'll see whether that time changes or not. But this was his turn to come to our counsel. And so he will be here. And we're looking forward to that. Oh, that's right there. And then Jane Peterson will be given an update on the Human Microbiome Project. And then we will, I believe, your requests, or some requests, I think, from counsel, hear about our training programs. And there'll be a joint presentation by Betty Graham, Ken Lang, and Janice Heimer about some of our institute's training program. So that's the open session. And now we just simply have to get through these seven categories with my presentation, starting with general NHGRI updates. Let me tell you, it's been a bizarre year for my rookie year at a lot of levels. It's actually been a bizarre year for the Bethesda area as well. Some of these things have really stressed the institute and stressed the leadership and stressed the people. And it sort of comes by way of elements. So for example, one of the elements that stressed us out was water, actually snow, to be more specific. Many of you remember we actually ended up having to cancel the in-person counsel meeting because a ridiculous amount of snowfall for the DC area hit, and you couldn't get here. So we ended up having to cancel that meeting. So that was our water element that was crazy. And then some of you actually also endured the crazy summer that we had. You'd think with all the snow, things would have cooled down. In fact, this was a record DC summer. And those of you who made it to our early meeting got a taste of it in July. It just never let up all summer. It was just totally crazy. So we had to deal with fire elements. It didn't end there. On July 16th, in a very rare occurrence, we actually had an earthquake here. 3.7 magnitude earthquake. And I noticed it says it woke. Most Maryland residents didn't wake all of us. Some of us are real early risers. I couldn't figure out what it was as I was just getting out of my shower. And I thought it was my air conditioning, and sure enough, I'd find out 20 minutes later there actually was an earthquake. But about 3 million people felt it around the Mid-Atlantic region. And fortunately, there wasn't too much damage. But that was because all the damage was waiting for nine days later. When we had this horrific storm came through July 25th, that actually brought 75 mile an hour winds and all sorts of damaged trees and structures and so forth, turns out it knocked out the power for a majority of residents that work at the Institute. Certainly a large number. Over 300,000 people, I think, was a number who lost power. Yours truly included. And so about three or four days after that, lots of trash bags were being used to throw away huge amounts of freezer and fridge contents. It was really quite a summer, needless to say. But this really stresses out the leadership, having to deal with water and fire, earth, and air. So we actually get special training. And one of the things we had to do was to go see this Grade B movie, as far as I could tell, this summer to get training. Actually, I'm actually on the right. And Mark Geyer is the one on the left, getting special training for dealing with elements and how they affect the Institute. So that was sort of what we've been dealing with since actually two councils ago. But hopefully, it won't be as crazy the next year. On a more serious note, there has been a very important update for me at the Institute for a variety of reasons. And that relates to an email that many of you got, I think, about a week or two ago, and relates to a very important senior level recruitment we made to the Institute. And that is Dan Kastner, who will be our new scientific director. And Dan is sitting right over there. And he can just quickly stand. Let me tell you a little bit about you don't have to keep standing while I'm talking about you, Dan, because I'm going to go on a while and you're going to get tired. So let me point out there was a very rigorous search that pursued the identification of the new director of our intramural program, a position I had held and unfortunately still hold, but only for a few more hours. Since 2002, I want to give a personal thanks to Rick Meyers, who was a council member who served on the search committee. We looked wide and far inside the Institute, outside the Institute, within NIH, outside NIH. At the end of the day, the person we identified, Dan Kastner, was not really in our house, but he was in a neighboring house. He was in another institute in their intramural program, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Disorders. Let me just briefly tell you about Dan. He got a philosophy degree from Princeton University and then got an MD and a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine, where he also served as chief resident. He came to NIH in 1985 in the intramural program. That's, I think, a key part of the story, where he originally came for rheumatology, fellowship training, but then built his own research program to study the genetic basis of rheumatologic disorders, and really did some pioneering work, beginning with understanding the genetic basis of familial Mediterranean fever, and then going on to identify other genes that are very important in disorders of inflammation. What is, I think, very important for our intramural program that Dan brings to this job is he is a physician and a scientist and a very active physician scientist. He's been clinically active in the NIH clinical center since he came here in 85, but meanwhile, has built a first rate research program and has really shown the way of how to do clinical research at NIH, which occasionally has its own unique challenges, but at the same time, has taken major leadership responsibilities along the way. He's gotten practically every title since 85, everything from branch chiefs to laboratory chiefs and others. He currently serves as the clinical director at NIAMS and our clinical director is Bill Gaul. In fact, they're very good friends and colleagues. But Dan has also has a very important title that he got several years ago where he was asked to take on an NIH-wide responsibility as being the NIH deputy director for intramural clinical research. And so I think that appointment really signifies the fact that he's regarded as one of the key leaders in clinical research within the intramural program. And that was very attractive to us, especially at this moment in time, thinking about applications of genomics and believing that our intramural program should play a major role in helping to pilot efforts and think about ways to do this and to really pursue it aggressively because of the advantages of having the strong clinical infrastructure in our clinical center. And so this just came very apparent to us that Dan would be a terrific person to come over to our institute and leave his clinical director responsibilities and take on the scientific director role. And he agreed to do so. We're not the only ones that have seen Dan as an outstanding person in his professional pursuits. He's a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation. He's an elected member of the Association of American Physicians. And just this year, in fact, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. So we are delighted. I am personally delighted that effective on October 10 of this year, that's 10, 10, 10, I will no longer be the acting scientific director and Dan will become the scientific director of the institute. And our plan will be to have Dan present to council. Whether we do it in February, September, we'll figure that out. But as I often would come and present to council every year, year and a half, we will certainly want to have Dan come and present to you to update the council about what is going on with our intramural program. And some of his ideas, which I guarantee you, will push the frontiers of clinical research opportunities in genomics. So getting Dan on board and shedding my responsibility as acting scientific director is step number two towards getting my sanity. This does leave the fact that we still have some important leadership things to do. I'm acting SD, but that is going to change. And that leaves Mark. He has his own sanity issues. But Mark has to still remain the acting deputy director of the institute. And we've got this accomplished, but who's going to replace Mark in his acting position? Well, you're going to help us do that because just a week or so ago, or maybe it's now 12 days ago, we launched this search. And all of you got an email, I believe, or should have, about our launching of the search. And this is the advertisement that will appear in journals, probably even this week. This is a very important appointment for the institute. It's a very important appointment to me. Personally, Alan Gutmacher, as you know, was our deputy director for many years. I thought he did an absolutely terrific job. I would love, if you know of a mini Alan out there, that would be terrific. We are, I just charged the search committee last week with their efforts. In fact, they are out, very active. Joanne Baumann, for example, is a member of our search committee, and she's doing a terrific job making lots of phone calls, contacts. And we are really just trying to network out there. I firmly believe that we're going to probably identify the right candidate by one of you helping us or one of you being interested, perhaps. But needless to say, this is going to be the major recruitment focus of the institute right now. And it is step three to my sanity recovery, because we really need a deputy director for many kinds of things that we want to do, especially now that we have a scientific director on board. The other, if I think about what have been the biggest things that have happened, yeah, Rick. I think in very generic ways. But what I will tell you, as I told the search committee, is, unlike the scientific director position, which I think is, while every institute is a little different, there are some very standard things that have to be done for that. I think if you looked across the NIH and you looked at all the different deputy directors, they come in various flavors and backgrounds. And so it's not cookie cutter. So what I would say is I could tell you the range, the menu of things I would want of a deputy. But I don't need all five of them. I mean, if they would just get two or three of those, that would be terrific. Sure, well, actually, yes, we can do that. We actually have some bullets that the search committee asked us to put together to summarize what I told them when I charged them and happy to share that. So yeah, we can do that. I think the biggest thing that happened at the institute this year was the early meeting in July, which was sort of the finale aspect in some ways of our strategic planning process. I thought it was a great meeting. I was particularly delighted that many council members were able to make it. I know not every one of you could. But remarkably, most of you did. And I thought it was just great at every level. I would point out, many of you worked long into the evening at some of the breakout groups and some of the discussions. But it really was a pivotal point to get very constructive feedback to help us really focus down on what we were thinking and what we had down on paper, what was right, what was wrong, what needed refinement. I will tell you, it had a major impact on refining the document. And as all of you know, we're now in the final stages of refining that document with the aim of publishing in sort of the next four to six months is the likely scenario. And so this has been a very important part of our year. I will tell you, it's certainly consuming a lot of Mark Dyer's and my and a handful of others' time just sort of getting that thing across the finish line. Getting this plan, this new strategic plan published is absolutely step four of my sanity recovery. And I'm very much looking forward to getting it out but also want to make sure we get it right. A few things I wanted to say about the early meeting because we did it, we tried some experiments and we're doing lots of this. Lots of things we're just trying. And so there were some novel components that I actually think in retrospect work quite well. We did video cast that meeting. We video cast it to institute staff members who couldn't make it or we didn't have room to accommodate because we only have about 220, 230 people there. But also there were a lot of the invitees who just couldn't travel for whatever reason or didn't want to come and melt in our heat. So, but we offered them the ability to join us by video casting. In addition, as many of you remember, we solicited from you and got names and from others and I personally invited over 100 genomics and genetics trainees, everything from graduate students to postdocs to clinical trainees. About 108 at the end were invited to participate remotely by video casting in and also participating in a blog that I'm going to tell you about in a minute. At the end, we had active viewers from 26 states. The most active states were Maryland and Massachusetts. We even had some viewers from China, for example. The peak on day, third day of the meeting with the second full day of the meeting, we had at 1.261 people, or at least IP addresses that were accessed in. So, we truly did reach, practically doubled the number of people that were in the room by being able to watch remotely, which we thought was great. I'll also tell you one other thing about the trainees is that several weeks after the early meeting, we invited the trainees who had participated to join a conference call with Mark Geyer and I and some other institute staff just to listen to, see what they had to say, figuring that they could have private time with the institute leadership. And it was a good discussion. We talked for a little over an hour and some of their concerns and some of their ideas were spot on in many ways. And so, I think, I hope they got something out of it. I got several emails afterwards indicating that indeed they did. So, again, it was a way to reach out to our trainees I thought was quite nice. And then we tried this micro blog, which is sort of becoming the rage around here. This was a bit of an experiment in some ways, but it's as much of a cultural experiment as anything else. I welcomed the micro blog with sort of an opening comment and then, wow, they just flew in. I mean, we had 186 registered users of this micro blog during the meeting. We had almost 1500 comments or tweets or whatever they're called that were posted over the three days. Four ad hoc groups were created to sort of be able to converse amongst themselves. I think it was widely viewed as a success. And in many ways, this is sort of becoming sort of a part of our culture at our institute. There's now been several meetings we've had in workshops where we've run blogs and people enjoy them and I think it hasn't been very disruptive to the meeting at all. Feedback is, but in any case, I just think it's something that we're gonna continue to try as part of some of our meetings. Who knows, maybe someday we'll even try a micro blog associated with an open session of counsel. That would be probably a little controversial, but what the heck, we might even think about that. I will tell you actually, by the way, that again, as part of sort of the use of electronic dimensions, if it's working, and I don't know if anybody can not and say it is, we're allegedly video casting the open session of, it is working, I'm getting a thumbs up. So this is live out to certainly people within NIH, but actually anybody who happened to learn about this by getting on our website and seeing it, we sort of pulled this together the last minute, but we are video casting the open session of counsel, as actually do some other institutes. So this is not, that's not, where are the cameras? There's one. There's definitely that one that's probably pointed. I mean, there's another one there. I don't know if they can pan or not, but there's a lot of secret ones that are planted, Rick, in various places, so. Okay, again, moving along, just announced, I think it was either a week ago or a week and a half ago, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, or otherwise known as P-Case Awards, which habitually seemed to be behind. I used to actually blame it on the previous administration, why they were always like a year or two off compared to the calendar, but these are just the fiscal year 2009, even though we're most of the way through fiscal year 2010, so I don't totally understand why it's always behind, but we actually are delighted that there are four researchers among a relatively elite small group of researchers that have NHGRI affiliations in some way or relationships with us, so I wanted to share this with you. So one of the P-Case awardees is a very talented physician scientist in our intramural program, a gentleman named Chuck Venditti, who's a tenure-track investigator of maybe about almost approaching the halfway point in his tenure track, and again, very active physician scientist, we were delighted he got this, and then not at our institute, but actually affiliated with us, Brian Brooks, is an investigator in the National Eye Institute, and Brian actually has one of about five adjunct appointments with our intramural program. We give those out very rarely, but we gave one to him, and he's actually been collaborator with us and quite involved with us. He's obviously an ophthalmologist, also a physician scientist, and so we were very proud that he got one as well. Manolis Kellis, who many of you know, was an associate professor at MIT and is an NHGRI grantee, is among the awardees, and then Bradley Mallon, who's also an extramural grantee, is an assistant professor at Vanderbilt, who's an merge investigator, and so we're really quite impressed. Genomics clearly is getting lots of attention, and these folks, two of them, within the intramural program, one in ours and one affiliated with us, and then two of our extramural grantees are among these four. There'll be a ceremony sometime, I think in the next couple of months, and they should usually get to meet the president and so forth, so this will be a big deal for them. Turning our attention to money and appropriations, I would, let me, and budget, let me just give you a couple updates, although not much new, it's sort of the theme of my updates. This fiscal year, we actually is, I was able to report this last time, this is where we are now, with about another two and a half weeks left in the fiscal year, and in terms of next year, this is what the president's budget looks like, with the NIH overall getting about a $1 billion increase, it's about a 3.2% increase, which is about equal to the rate of biomedical inflation. We should actually be pleased to even get that, and we're considering the tight budget climate we're in and big cuts to other parts of both the bill that this sits in, but also other bills as well. The appropriations bill has only sort of been considered and marked up within committee, it hasn't gotten outside of the relevant committees yet, but this is what it's looking like. You will note that NHGRI is slated for a slightly higher than average increase. This is because, and I don't know if Francis talked about this or not, but it's not an across the board increase for all institutes. Francis has implemented a circumstance, at least this fiscal year, next fiscal year, whereby your increase is partially dictated by how well your program aligns with his five themes, and good news was we aligned well with his five themes, so we did a little better than average. So at the moment, we're looking at 3.5%, but this is a crazy year, right? And so the midterm elections coming up, as a result of that, it's unlikely, almost for certain, we're not gonna have a real budget. We will be under a continuing resolution, almost for certain October one. It's also likely eventually our bill will get sort of bundled with an omnivist bill as opposed to just being approved on its own. That's only happened a couple times in the last decade. So, and when that happens, as anybody's guessed, there have been some thoughts maybe by December, January, we would get an omnivist bill through when we'd have our budget, but we'll see. Fingers crossed, I think it's hard to know what would happen. A continuing resolution for the whole year would be unfortunate because we would miss out on at least a three and a half or 3% increase, and that would make a huge difference at a lot of levels. I will tell you that 2012 doesn't look so great at the moment. There's been lots of discussion about across the board, domestic spending cuts. I will tell you that we were asked fairly recently as part of a very open process when in terms of memos coming out from the Office of Management and Budget, asking all federal agencies to come up with plans for possible cuts. In 2012, we were asked internally to go through an exercise of figuring out if we faced a 5% cut, what would that look like? We have gotten signals from the NIH leadership that if a cut would happen, it would not be across the board equal. So once again, it would be a matter of how it aligned to the overall agency's priorities, but still any sort of word of a cut makes everybody very nervous and uncomfortable, understandably. So we will see, but you're watching the same news I'm watching, and it's dicey out there, politically and budgetarily and so forth. Okay, so those were my institute specific updates. Let me move on to NIH updates. Start off, speaking of rookie years, Francis survived his. Many of you may have seen this article that came out in nature about a summary of his first year at the helm. You will be hearing from Francis in just a couple of hours or so. He has had no shortage of complexities and surprises, as I'm sure he will share with you. I'm sure he has his own multi-step program to recovering his sanity. I'm not sure what it looks like. I do know one aspect of it, which I will go through a little bit, is he's told me, like myself, he has just spent a huge amount of time recruiting. He's had a lot of very senior positions to fill, but he's gotten significant traction even in the last four months, and so I'm gonna show you that in the next four slides. So for example, as many of you know, Rainer Kington, the previous principal deputy director left to become president of Grinnell College, and that's very recent, but following an internal search and evaluation, Larry Tabeck was identified and appointed as the new principal deputy director at NIH. He had previously been the director of the National Institute of Dental and Craneal Facial Research since 2000. Prior to that, he held several leadership positions at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, including senior associate dean for research and director of the Center for Oral Biology, professor of dentistry and professor of chemistry and biophysics. He has his own research program that focuses on the biosynthesis and function of use in glycoproteins, but in the past handful of years, he's really distinguished himself in taking on many major trans-NIH roles. He was the acting principal deputy director, the role he now has permanently. From November 2008 to August 2009, when Rainer Kington was acting director of NIH, Larry stepped in to be his deputy, and so he's already sort of experienced this job, and then most recently, he's and continues to be, right now, the director of the NIH Division of Program Coordination Planning and Strategic Initiatives, which I'm gonna talk about in a couple of slides, which is where the Common Fund lives, and he's been acting director of that, and I think really he's done a fantastic job, and I think that's why it was very clear that he was a perfect person to take on this new responsibility. Isabel Garcia, who's currently the deputy director at the Dental Institute, will act as director until a permanent new director is identified. On the extramural side of the deputy director grouping, if you will, Sally Rocky was previously the acting deputy director for extramural research, following the search, has been appointed the permanent director. She had been acting director since fall of 2008. She'd been at NIH something like eight or nine years, and very experienced seasoned extramural program leader, and now will serve as the deputy director for extramural research. This was a very important recruitment I know for Francis. So Deepa Kipsy, as we call it internally, because it just has so many ridiculous words associated with the title of division of program, coordination, planning, and strategic initiatives, just think of, I mean it does a lot of things in terms of all of its words, planning and coordinating and evaluating and so forth. What's most relevant to us is that this is the home of the Common Fund, previously known as the Roadmap. And so this is $450,000, half a billion dollars, something like the $450,000, 500 million dollars, Common Fund money. And so this individual has a responsibility of a pretty important portfolio of activity. And so it was wonderful that search committee and was able to identify great candidates of Francis was able to recruit Jim Anderson, who's currently a professor and chair of the Department of Cell and Molecular Physiology at University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He has extensive clinical experiences, both as an internist and a hepatologist. He's considered one of the top authorities in the world, in the area of tight junctions and paracellular transport. He's been an NIH grantee for almost 20 years. He will be arriving later this month. I have not met him yet, but it's high on both of our agendas to get to know each other. I would tell you, this is actually very important for our institute. Why? Because we have, as an institute, a crazy disproportionate amount of responsibility for co-running common fund programs, as I'll get to you later on. And I think you know, and part of it is because we're good at it, and part of it is because a lot of the things that are being done, we have such experience in terms of running these consortium and sort of managing these kinds of programs. And so there's no question, and I know he already realizes this, that this is a very important relationship and interaction. And so I'm really looking forward to getting to know him, and I'm sure he definitely wants to get to know us because we have so much responsibility for things that are now gonna be his responsibility. So I would imagine, I don't know if it'll be next council the one after, but there's no question we're gonna wanna have him come present to council, because I'm sure he has ideas on how some of this might even change in the future. And I think that's one of the ideas is to think about common fund and how all these things are decided upon, organized and so forth. I know Francis is looking for sort of new ideas for sort of the next version of this under new leadership. And as I mentioned earlier, Larry Tabak continues to be acting for another week or two until Jim Anderson arrives. In the area of behavioral and social sciences research, the NIH has this office called the Office of the Behavioral and Social Science Research, or OBSSR, and it has been under acting leadership for some time, but now Robert Kaplan from UCLA has been recruited to come lead that office. He's a distinguished professor in the Department of Health Services at the School of Public Health and the Department of Medicine. His research interests include behavioral medicine, health services research, health outcome measurements, and multivariant data analysis. He's a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He actually won't arrive until early 2011, but again, I think for some of the things that both our intramural researchers are involved with and some of the things we've thought about on our extramural side are involved and this could also be another important relationship to think about. And the next important appointment that Francis was able to make is a familiar face, one that is making many of us just smile of when this was announced, and that is an Allen Gutmacher after serving as acting director of this Institute and then being stolen to be the acting director of the Child Health Institute, applied for and was successful in being appointed the new director of NICHD and we just think this is great and later on I'll even tell you about already some of the ways you can imagine we will now be able to interact with that Institute and we're thinking of all sorts of things, such a natural interaction between the two Institutes and having Allen at the helm, we're just certain that this is gonna be a new era with those two Institutes. And speaking of awesome relationships with other Institutes, this is game-changing as well. As you heard about at last council that Harold was, we were successful in convincing Harold to come back to NICH for the second time, his second return to NICH this time as the head of the Cancer Institute and it's wonderful to have him here. I'll have a few comments to make when we get to TCGA, obviously a very important part and a very important aspect of our relationship with NCI. If you're interested by the way on document 10 within there, there's actually a whole video you could watch of his town hall meeting that he had after he arrived and if you're interested you might wanna watch that. The other development by the way, which I think I told you last time which now is in full motion is that Harold needed to find a home for his intramural lab and one of the terms to actually come back as NCI director was that he would be allowed to have his intramural lab within our Institute's intramural program. And so we said absolutely that was fine, we'd love that. And so he is now his lab, actually first person's arrived already and another one's in the way in a couple of weeks and I'll be running a small group right there in building 50 in the middle of our intramural program. This actually brings up sort of step five of my five step recovery to get sane again is I actually made the personal decision to sort of phase out my own research program. I just simply felt I couldn't do this job well and continued to maintain the kind of lab I'd wanna maintain. This actually became Harold's fortune because Harold needed to hire some senior technician or two to run his lab and that just worked out great. I had a couple of one of which is working with me for almost 20 years and just on the same floor was just able to slide over and set up his lab for him and a very experienced lab manager. And so my decision for getting sane actually worked to Harold's benefit and now two of my lab members are becoming part of his lab. So those are the recruitments I wanted to tell you about. So a few other things in general NIH wide I wanted to share with you. One was just signed that just happened just a few weeks ago that relates a political event of course that involved the vice president and it involved a major announcement that the White House made including a report that talked about how the impact of error funding had various sectors but with a real emphasis on science and needless to say NIH was commonly featured in this and so under document 11 there's all sorts of things we shared with you a press release, the actual report which is shown on the upper left and also some of Biden's statements in prepared remarks and there's just three of them that you can read there you can just sort of see how genomics and various aspects of disease and cancer and genome sequencing sort of heavily got in I think probably had quite a bit to do with that or certainly NIH did but it was this big event down at the one of the buildings near the White House and we were asked to send some of our staff and send some of our grantees three of our staff members went and seven of our grantees went I think one of them was Ross, you were there right and everything I heard about it was terrific for a variety of reasons not to the least of which to have the vice president singing praises about your own research activities but also just I think the vice president actually spent time with folks there he is yelling at Jeff Schloss for something I don't know why or at least doing something to make Jeff wins and then the lower picture has the vice president meeting Debbie Nickerson you can see and Steve Turner and Stuart Lindsay so several of our grantees and so this was a very nice event and I encourage you if you're interested to do what the vice president had to say to read his remarks or to look more closely at that report also on the NIH stage relevant to genetics has been a pretty significant new development related to genetic testing something that obviously Francis cares a lot about Kathy Hudson, NIH chief of staff cares a lot about and with them on the scene it was inevitable that there was gonna be some action on this front by way of background many of you know there's about 1600 genetic tests are available to patients and consumers but there's no single public resource that provides detailed information about them so in March NIH announced it was gonna create a public database for searching information that would be submitted voluntarily by genetic test providers this was called the genetic testing registry or GTR and it aims to enhance access to information about the availability, the validity and usefulness of genetic tests and you can imagine that interacting with all the different stakeholders everybody from the people who develop these tests to the people who manufacture them to the healthcare providers to patients and consumer groups as well as researchers it's gonna be critical part to make this thing work especially if it's gonna be voluntary it's often running there was a request for comments about the genetic testing registry posted in the federal registry the federal register in June and there have been lots of comments that have been received so still early days on this but it certainly is an important development that the kind of thing that's been talked about for a long time and this is now getting traction I don't know if Francis is gonna talk about this or not but I'm sure he'll happily take questions if you have detailed questions about it what I am certain Francis will talk about I'll just set him up because it is also relevant for one of the concept clearance you're gonna hear he will use the T word I guarantee you Therapeutics is a huge emphasis of attention by NIH leadership and increasingly across all the institutes it touches our institute as well in various ways in particular I will tell you that there's just been continued intense developmental activities around this thing called the Therapeutics for Rare Neglected Diseases or Trend Program and you'll be hearing more about that from Susan Old but also this thing called the Cures Acceleration Network which was built into the healthcare reform legislation and there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of things that are just sort of crazy complex at the moment Trend and the Chemical Genomic Center which was part of the roadmap which sort of feeds into all this and the Cures Acceleration Network as it likely will start to get initiated next year all live within NHGRI at the moment and administratively that has all, it's just complicated it's probably the best way I would phrase and whether that's true long term or not is a whole separate issue but I'm not gonna say much more about it because I know Francis will talk about it and Susan Old will have a specific concept clearance around Trend to talk to you about but needless to say this is something that is big and that we have been asked to step in and really help at least at an interim basis sort of incubate some of this stuff as it starts to grow up. Okay, so let me move beyond NIH and sort of look more globally at the genomics as a field and just sort of give you some highlights that have come up over the last four months. One of the highlights was June 26th because June 26th marked the 10th anniversary of the announcement of the draft sequence of the human genome. Lots of media attention appropriately so. For there was this piece I'm sure many of you saw in Nature. There was a very nice, and all this by the way all these clippings are available under document 13. Harold Varmas wrote a nice piece in New England Journal. Nicholas Wade had his own idea about things as did Craig Venter and then Andrew Pollock as well wrote a piece about this. So sort of a lot of media attention, good, bad, other it's the usual, those clippings are just highlighted here and you can see and even Charlie Rose got into the act and had a whole interview with Eric Lander and Francis Collins about this and this was all fine. I thought it was great that a lot of attention brought to bear about this. I think we will similarly see a lot of attention in February with the 10th anniversary of the publication of the two draft sequences of the human genome. One other piece by the way I just sort of made a separate slide for document 14 if you hadn't seen Jeffrey Carr wrote a multi-component piece in The Economist which was published all in one big special issue but the fact is you can get to all of it on the web and if you haven't seen this you might take a look at it and through links you can get to all five or six parts of the series and so again it's a nice story that he talks about again commemorating the 10th anniversary. We did our own thing to try to stimulate science writers to encourage them to write about this important milestone and also to provide any background in education materials so our communications and public liaison branch organized a science writers workshop back in June the goal of which was to simply help them write stories and to really help inform them about sort of the significance the last 10 years. I served as the emcee of this event Francis came and spoke Sharon Kerry was our lunchtime speaker we had about 50 people who attended this in downtown DC about 25 media journalists from 25 media outlets including New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post Newsweek Science and Nature attended we had about another 25 science writers from communications offices sprinkled across NIH and CDC and FDA attended as well and all of this was videotaped and is available on the web and so again on document 15 you can get to links that will get you all the background materials and all the videotapes of all of these for science writer level lectures that were given there was, it did stimulate some writing and in fact one of the writers who came and attended that workshop wrote this featured piece in USA Today on the last day of the early meeting that came out not just coincidentally on July 8th so we thought that was a successful outcome of that workshop that USA Today wrote a very nice story so that's on the sort of media front what's going on on the legislative front and here there are a few things to highlight that I just wanted to touch on there is a new bill that which is a bit of a reform previous version or a new version of a previously formulated bill on personalized medicine is the genomics and personalized medicine act of 2010 sponsored by representative Kennedy of Rhode Island the bill would create an office of personalized healthcare in the secretary's office that would provide a grant making structure through which the department would fund projects to advance the field it would establish a national bio bank and it would attempt to improve clinical genetic testing regulation it's really not expected to move certainly not in this session unclear what will happen to it there have been other similar bills that have sort of hung around so we'll see it's something we are monitoring it's something that we've been asked to to give some input about but it's unclear how much traction it's going to get in terms of stimulating other activities on Capitol Hill it's notable Francis gave a very major testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce's subcommittee on health he talked about a variety of things obviously it's five themes he certainly talked about some of the conflict of interest issues that are worrying some members of Congress and he talked about the Gulf oil spill and follow-up studies I'm going to talk about later in my director's report it was regarded as a very good hearing that usually when Francis goes to Capitol Hill it's always a good hearing so it's worth pointing that out the only other thing I would say about on the legislative front is that when I first became director there was the middle of health care reform and at that time there was actually I don't know if I wasn't allowed I think I actually wasn't allowed they really wanted to only have any interactions from the department with members of Congress focused around health care reform a lot of really keeping track of the topics and focus on health care reform and once health care reform was done that all changed and then it is apparently quite customary for new institute directors to go and start to build relationships get to know folks especially those in Congress who are interested in genomics personalized medicine and so forth and so they started to let me out that's sort of the best way to phrase it so Laura Rodriguez and I and some other staff members have gone now about three or four times down to Capitol Hill in some cases being asked to go and getting invited to police come they want to meet us and so I've gone and had actually two meetings one brief one, one much longer one with Congresswoman Slaughter from New York a longtime friend of the institute and a champion of the Genetic Information and Discrimination Act I went and met with Jim Landewen who's a Democrat from Rhode Island a strong supporter of stem cell research and very interested in biomedical research actually quite interested in coming out and having a tour of some of our facilities that'll likely happen and then most recently we met went and met with Congressman Burgess who I've actually met before who's a congressman from Texas who's a physician he's an obstetrician and has a lot of interest in personal genomics I got there, he when I met with him he instantly told me about his 23andMe results and avagenetics results and he just got on himself and so I mean he's very interested in this and it'll come up a little bit later in my director's report some of the activities that are going on in Congress so those sorts of interactions are continuing there's actually plans for some additional ones as well and that's actually a very good thing so speaking of that speaking of personal genomics that was my segue there has been a lot of action going on in the last few months in the arena of personal genomics and especially around director consumer genetic services just by way of background there's obviously some growing concern over the unregulated nature of the industry increasing amounts of medical information being provided directly to consumers concerns about different companies providing different information to the same customers sometimes conflicting and is that gonna be a healthy situation without having a clinician involved and should these be regulated should these companies be regulated if so who should be doing it and so some of this sort of there's a lot of angles to this story some of you probably even know it better than I do or are more involved but the FDA contacted 21 director consumer companies asking them about what they're doing in terms of getting pre-market approval for their tests FDA considers their products devices not lab developed tests and then sort of actually asked each of these companies to come meet with FDA to discuss their tests and what would be needed for approval meanwhile and quite related the House Committee on Energy and Commerce added a hearing that in part was prompted by pathway genomics plan to sell test kits at Walgreens if you recall and it also was partially based on some high profile high profile lab errors that were made by 23andMe where 87 customers got the wrong results and so there was this testimony there was this hearing that took place here's a sort of a screen capture if you will of the four individuals who testified Jim Evans who's a geneticist at University of North Carolina and then representatives from three of these companies including pathway genomics Jeff Shuren who's the director of the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the FDA also testified and told the committee that FDA has plans to regulate the sales of director consumer genetic tests and that FDA does consider these tests to be medical devices all three companies at the hearing said they welcome FDA's involvement in setting industry standards so that individuals would get similar results regardless of the service they use but when asked what that meant and if they were prepared to suspend sales and marketing until FDA had all that done 23andNavagenetics declined to do so and pathway genomics had already halted their director consumer offering after the Walgreens circumstance. The other thing that happened at these hearings which caught a lot of publicity a lot of news coverage is that Greg cuts at the government accountability office at GAO talked about an investigation that they had been conducted into several of these director consumer genetic testing companies here is a cover sheet and get to it in document 17 of their report so the government accountability office did what's called sort of a secret shopper investigation into these companies discovering wide-ranging discrepancies on the results returned to the same individuals by different companies. They stayed at 68% of the time donors got different information on the same disease risk from different companies. Additionally, they made some undercover calls to 15 of these companies and exposing a wide number of examples of deceptive marketing, misinformation and other questionable practices. Company representatives for example made some highly misleading claims telling the caller for example that a positive result for their cancer predisposition markers meant almost certainly getting cancer or that DNA could be repaired with products that the company also sells as well as fictitious celebrity endorsements. So you could imagine this has gotten the interest of some members of Congress and certainly was saying that Congressman Burgess was interested in talking to me about when I met with him and I'm sure there's gonna be some additional scrutiny that's gonna be placed on this. So it was interesting time. On a related of those again it's not the same thing but it is also relevant here is that FDA separately had a two-day meeting that some people from the Institute attended to solicit public comments about how to proceed with the regulation of lab developed tests and another genetic testing issue that's very much the forefront. This was FDA's proactive attempt to really try to start getting their hands around some of these issues. 14 professional societies, nine clinical labs, 26 companies, three advocacy groups gave public comments and some of them were listed fears of excessive regulatory burden calls not to duplicate current efforts if FDA gets involved, need to address software analysis tool, how all this intersects with this thing I talked about earlier the NIH's genetic testing registry. However, the direct to consumer genomics may not be considered. As I said earlier, lab developed tests according to FDA. So this continues to be complicated. I just wanted to give you a flavor of what's transpired over the last four months where obviously many of us are keeping our eyes on this but it's not exactly clear where all the pieces are gonna fall in the end. So, oh, I'm sorry, I told you all that without advancing. I gotta keep a better eye on my PowerPoint screens. So that's what I just covered. Other interesting things that some of you may have heard about regard universities' interest in personal genomics and using that as part of their curriculum which at the surface I think is a really interesting idea and it's always the devils and the details and how it gets used and whether it involves real genetic information about individuals or fictitious. And so Stanford University was one of two, I don't know about the Bay Area, they're really getting into this, but one of them is Stanford and using this as part of medical genetics or medical school curriculum they talked about a course that's trying to have students study genotype data and then the one that got a little bit more crazy in some ways was University of California Berkeley which had to modify its original plans because of the lack of clear approval that was going into the genetic information that was being generated about the students that were gonna analyze their own data, so they had to modify their plans. But again, I think this is interesting to watch and I think it feeds into sort of a broader set of discussions that are relevant around how are we going to educate public and medical students and residents and so forth around these genomic advances. That leads a nice segue into this article which I'd call to your attention in part because I am trained as pathologist and so I was interested in this being published in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology and in part because the second and last author is Mark Bogusky who many of you know is a member of the genomics community previous at NCBI and is also trained as a pathologist and I know Mark from our Washington University days where we both trained and now finds himself in one of the pathology departments at one of the affiliated Harvard hospitals and where they are taking the bull by the horn in some ways and are really pushing very aggressively in this article describe how they believe that there's sort of a call to arms, they say, a call to action that pathologists should get much more involved in genomics and personalized medicine and talk about a significant revamping of pathology curriculum, post-graduate curriculum around genomics and we'll see what happens. I've actually at a personal level have found the field of pathology as someone who trained in pathology to be a bit of sleep at the wheel for the last 20 years and this is sort of the first thing I've seen that is in any way I thought attempting to wake them up. I will point out that coming out of this article as a result of this article is actually a band very meeting that these folks, Mark Bogusky and Jeff Saffitz who's the senior author of Organized, that'll be taking place sometime in the next few weeks I'm attending it as well, again to try to sort of solidify this plan for a more widespread curriculum change in pathology training around genomics and personalized medicine. So again, another thing to watch. It wouldn't be a four month interval if there wasn't some wacko stories around personal genomics so I have to always share those with you. The wacko story I think of the past four months was this one around Ozzy Osbourne just filled the tabloids, both genomic tabloids and otherwise there is a company in St. Louis that is sequencing Ozzy Osbourne's genome for the rationale that they wanna figure out genetically how he could survive so much drug abuse. So it just spread across the internet when this thing hit. So it's the bizarre story of the past four months. The runner up is probably this one. This is one that relates to Sitting Bull because researchers at the University of Copenhagen have approval of Sitting Bull's descendants to sequence DNA from a sample of his hair and as the story went, if successful would become the first ancient non-frozen Native American's genome to be sequenced. So this was also sort of, but this came in second to Ozzy Osbourne, you have to, but it's a good one. So those are my two crazy personal genome stories of the past four months. On a more serious note around personal genomes, Cold Spring Harbor meeting took place and did yesterday at four or three or something. So this, in fact, several council members came directly from that meeting to here. Rick Wilson was there. I know Rick Myers was there. Richard was one of the organizers. I spoke at the meeting on Friday, but then I had to quickly scurry away to get ready for today. I would only say, I don't have the full feeling of the meeting because I wasn't there. Being there just on Friday, one thing I do think is interesting, just at least from what I saw on Friday, is that if you sort of think about meeting space, whether it be the Cold Spring Harbor genome meeting in the spring, the Marco Island meeting, American side of human genetics meeting, whether, and then what this meeting has been doing, I think there are a set of issues that are coming to the forefront. I think we talked about them a lot and early, and certainly I think our strategic plan will start touching on them around some of these issues about how are we really gonna deploy this in a clinical setting and around CLIA certification and around analysis of individual genomes and maybe all of that area, that space, will be taken up by existing meetings or whether a meeting like this will thrive by being able to capture that. I don't know if there was a consensus at the meeting. I'm sure Richard's an organizer will be asked to think about that. I know Cold Spring Harbor's thinking about it, but I actually do think that there are some really hard issues that clinically are gonna have to be addressed and I don't know what the right meeting venue is gonna be that's gonna absorb the critical debate around that whether it's this meeting I don't know. I don't know if anybody wants to comment who was at that meeting, but that was the one, from being there one day that was my one observation was the recognition that there's some hard things that we're gonna be hearing about over the next five and 10 years as this really gets implemented in a clinical setting. Okay, let me move on then to the extramural program and lots going on. As always, we tend to start with our large-scale sequencing program. The organisms featured in the last four months. First, the International P-AMFID Consortium published a draft genome sequence of the P-AMFID and plus biology. It's a major agricultural pest worldwide. This is really me, I'm gonna abandon it. There we go. Agricultural pest worldwide and also a model organism for studying insect plant interactions. Meanwhile, the WashU researchers published their draft sequence of the Western Clawed Frog, otherwise known as Xenopus tropicalis in Science Magazine. Many of you know Xenopus tropicalis is an important organism model for vertebrate development. Meanwhile, WashU researchers also published a near-complete transcriptome of the canine hookworm and BMC genomics. Hookworm infection is one of the major rare neglected tropical diseases affecting about a billion people per year in developing countries. Moving to medical sequencing, Debbie Nickerson, who I showed you a picture of earlier in Jay Shenduri, used exome sequencing, whole exome sequencing to discover that the MLL2 gene when mutated causes Kabuki syndrome. It's a very nice study published in Nature Genetics. Kabuki syndrome is a rare pediatric disorder characterized, as you can tell by its name, from these facial, unusual facial appearances and also, but is associated with more other serious consequences such as heart defects, growth deficiency, mental retardation. And that was a nice illustration of whole exome sequencing for identifying medically important genes. Moving on to the cancer genome atlas. As I mentioned earlier, Harold is on board, really is enthusiastic about TCGA and has really, it's been wonderful to start interacting with him with lots more to come. I think it's gonna really be a new era for this important project and there is a lot going on. I'm quite sure some elements that are gonna change. I think Harold and I both have ideas about sort of thinking about version 2.0 of this and sort of the next phase and so I think there'll be lots of things we'll be discussing in the upcoming months. Meanwhile, they've got lots to do and they're marching along. As an example, the manuscript on ovarian cancer, which has been in the works for a while has now been submitted. Nearly 500 ovarian tumors were accrued and characterized, about a little over 300 of those cases underwent whole exome sequencing and about 20,000 somatic mutations were identified and have been analyzed and will continue to be analyzed. This is a very important paper and is now under review. And then meanwhile, lots of new data sets are out there. Everything from AML to colon rectal breast and kidney cancers and in fact, these data sets are being made available on a rolling basis. Other major publication, I think just from last week or a week before, something like that. The third generation map of the human genome, I mean, human genetic variation that included the addition of about seven more populations and really to get at much more rare variants, a very nice paper. I know Richard was heavily involved in this and this now represents the third of three major HapMap page papers to be published. And if you're interested, that paper is available in document 25. In terms of genetic variation, a thousand genomes project marches along. They have released data from the pilot projects and have also submitted a paper that's undergoing revision now, hopefully be published early November, describing their early efforts. The FTP site has more than 10 gigabases of sequence data for about 624 samples and variants from the first 1,100 samples will be released by November. So any case, lots going on on thousand genomes as well. Not one of our programs, but just something that relates to these kinds of variation projects and population sequencing, the Wellcome Trust and Sanger Institute announced this UK 10K project, which aims over the next three years to completely sequence about 4,000 well-phenotyped individuals and sequence the exomes of about 6,000 people with particular disorders. So again, this is Wellcome Trust pursuit, not directly involved with us, but certainly something we wanna watch and be aware of and certainly it'll be a data set that'll be of great interest to the scientific community. Turning our attention to DNA sequencing technology program, there's several documents under number 28 that are worth looking at and activities ongoing. I believe the press release goes out today for 10 new awards or continued awards under our $1,000 genome sequencing technology development program. And so if you wanna read about that, look at that press release. In addition, we wanted to point out it's a remarkable accomplishment that have really taken place by our grantees as an example. Our grantees have published about 50 papers in the past year alone describing their work that we are funding in this program. And so we actually have compiled that if you wanted to take a look. Meanwhile, in terms of future efforts, we've reissued the RFA for R01, R21 and SBIR grant applications with three application receipt dates in October for each of the next three years. And so continuing our pursuits there. And also there's a nice story we wrote about our program that featured on the website. And that's also one of the documents under number 28. Our ENCODE and MODENCODE program, several things to update. In July, the ENCODE Analysis Working Group met in Barcelona focusing on analyses that will be described in the ENCODE integrative analysis paper. There's a little icon there that talks about a symposium that was held in Barcelona at the same time called the ENCODE project 10 years after the human genome sequence. And then meanwhile, there's a meeting that's planned with the ENCODE PIs later on this fall to work out the details of this important paper that they will be preparing and hopefully submitting in the not too distant future. Speaking of papers, the ENCODE PIs have put together a user's guide for ENCODE data. Rick, is it submitted yet or is it nearly submitted? Next week. Next week. So a week away, I've seen various drafts flying around. But in about a week from now, it'll be a user's guide to accessing and utilizing ENCODE data. MODENCODE, the analysis working group is close to submitting separate integrative analysis papers both for fly and for worm. So more papers are getting close to being submitted. And meanwhile, mouse ENCODE is up and running. Four groups, you may recall, were funded to initiate ENCODE-like studies in mouse. And those are now up and going. Again, this was money that came through stimulus funding. Moving on to our SEGS program, Centers for Excellence in Genome Sciences. We currently support 10 active SEGS grants. There is one new award that was made this year and that's to George Church. And last year, NHGRI and NIMH issued a revised program announcement. And the first set of applications in response to that announcement has been received and it will be talking about at the February council meeting. It's notable that 2010 is the last year of funding for two of the original set of SEGS awards. So they've got their full 10 years of funding and can go on no more. And those two individual PIs were D.D. Meldrum and Mike Snyder. And then, oh, I also, yeah, the application will be considered February council. And then the next grantee workshop of the SEGS, you can see the picture of this one from the 2009 meeting, the 2010 meeting, which will be held together with the NHGRI Diversity Action Plan Workshop. It will take place in Arizona State University next month. And I will be attending that as well. Yes, do you want to use your microphone? And we'll make sure to get a really close up video of you. So is there a, not quota, but do we have a defined number of these? Is that how NHGRI thinks about it? Or is it, I mean, what if you got, you know, three more great applications than you would normally fund? What would you do? Or we have guidance as to the total amount of money that's being spent on the program when it comes out to about 10 applications, but there's no strict limit. As I recall, the amount allowed per year is two million, either direct or total. I can't remember per year. And did anybody ever come in less than 1.9999 million? I'm not sure if there anyone ever came in for less than that. Several have were awarded for less than that. Okay. Moving on for our LC program, just a couple, several updates I wanted to tell you. First of all, we were delighted to receive about $1.8 million of money from the Office of the Director for their bioethics common funds to support three LC research grants as well as an administrative supplement. So that's external money coming into the Institute, which we always like to see. Gene McEwen will actually be giving an update about LC program issues during the open session. And the last thing to point out is their triennial LC research conference will be taking place in April of next year. And at Chapa Hill, North Carolina, I'm actually planning to give a talk at that meeting as well. Knockout Mouse Program or COMP, which is expanding its research mission to include phenotyping, otherwise known as COMP2. And those RFAs have now been published for the Knockout Mouse Phenotyping project. And meanwhile, original COMP is on track to achieve its goals by the end of the project, which will take place by fall of 2011. You can sort of see the graph there that shows that they're pretty much keeping online with their projection. Winding down a little now in terms of extramural, let me just point out something I mentioned last time, but it continues, is that a lot of issues around informatics and computational biology, one is just the challenge of the beast, of just issues associated with the science. The other is some internal issues related to our coordination with NCBI, which is complicated, and from both sides, I can tell you. And so we really, I think, are really found, I think, some ways to really help facilitate coordination. We now have these quarterly meetings with NCBI that I put in place from early discussions with Jim Ostell and David Lippmann. I think it's really helped our communication, our coordination, we are much more, things are just better set up to track projects and make them aware on both sides of what the needs are gonna be and really to track progress and sort of resolve issues. We also have put into place a more official position, Vivian Benazza, who's one of our extramural program officers, program directors, is now officially designated sort of the liaison between our institute and NCBI, so there's sort of a single point of contact that really helps that communication channel, and I think that's also helping Chris Wetterstrand, who's now working directly for me to help a whole host of issues associated with the extramural program and coordination liaison type of activities is actually helping Vivian on this because I regard this as so important for sort of getting better coordination and communication between us and NCBI. Meanwhile, there's just a lot going on out there in terms of meetings and discussions and all that, and so we have Vivian and others going out and others on our staff going out to some important meetings. Beyond the Gino meeting that's going to take place, there's going to be some additional discussion around cloud computing that has captured some of our attention, and then we just got invited and are sending some staff to this PennisGal computing and personalized medicine meeting that'll take place at University of Illinois really next month. Actually, both of these meetings are taking place next month. Okay, so that's extramural, and of course we have all of Common Fund. We don't deal with all of Common Fund. We seem to deal with a lot of Common Fund, so lots of updates of things that we don't directly own, but we co-own, if you will. Starting with Human Microbiome Project where we have major responsibility for leading, there are several highlights. I don't want to steal all of Jane's thunder. I'll just steal a little. There was this wonderful paper that came out in Science describing in May, describing 178 microbial genome sequences, the first of their catalog being created by the Human Microbiome Project. Meanwhile, I was told, I wasn't able to make it, that there was a terrific meeting that took place. Actually, Rick Wilson was just telling me that it was one of the local sponsors of it that was a great meeting. I heard that from staff as well. Took place just a couple of weeks ago, really showing the remarkable growth in the field and a lot of activity in the field. We actually have just put out very recently, press release about new awards in three areas, demonstration projects, technology development, and computational tools. And some of the first one relates to the future of UH, which previously were UH2 awards that now have been approved to move on to UH3 awards. And that's really all I want to say because Jane Peterson is going to be giving a larger presentation about Human Microbiome Project. Another project I want to tell you about Common Fund Project is G-TEX, or Genotype Tissue Expression. By way of background, this is one of these common fund projects being co-led, in this case by us and by NIMH. It has a pilot funding for two years. And it's the real goal of the pilot is to show the feasibility of collecting high quality RNA for expression analysis from multiple tissues from the same deceased donor. And so the idea over this two and a half or roughly two year pilot is to collect multiple tissues for about 160 deceased donors and be able to do expression QTL analysis. Now what's happened so far is that an award has now been made to the Broad Institute for a contract to serve as a laboratory data analysis and coordinating center. Meanwhile, the University of Miami will serve as the brain bank. Basically whole brains will be sent there actually using supplemental funds that are being co-funded by NIMH, NINDS and NIDA, sort of the brain institutes, if you will. There will soon be awards that'll be made for three to four biospecimen source sites. This is being awarded as a contract as part of a larger initiative at NCI called CA Hub for the Cancer Human Biobank. We're sort of grafting off of them, if you will to sort of get this project up and going. There is gonna be sort of an inaugural GTEX kickoff meeting at the end of September. Importantly, we also, and part of my request and Tom Insel's request put in place an external scientific panel to provide us external feedback about the project. In part because we need to assess if this pilot is successful. If it is successfully, ideas that it would scale up to something like 1,000 donors over years three to five, but that's just not gonna happen unless we clearly show that the pilot phase has been successful. Another roadmap project that we have major leadership responsibilities for is library of integrated network based cellular signatures or links. This case we co-lead this project with the Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. It is a pilot with three years of funding, three million years this year, 10 million next year and 10 million the year after. The goal is to facilitate a mechanistic understanding of disease and support of drug and biomarker development. This will be done by creating a library of perturbation induced cellular signals that will relate cellular responses to genetic variation, environmental exposures and clinical phenotypes, but also to develop computational tools and approaches to analyze cellular signatures and new technologies for generating novel signatures. Updates to tell you is that there's several RFA's out around, that have been out around these phase one initiatives and those are listed there, some of which are still active. The first of which relates to these U54 awards and those awards now have been issued, there's two of them, to Todd Gala for the Broad and Tim Mitchelson at Harvard. First meeting of the grantees is taking place later this month and obviously there's a lot of early collaboration and coordination and data standardization needs to take place. It'll be the goal of this first meeting. Another common fund initiative that we are responsible for co-leading is the protein capture reagent. Certainly science has been discussed, we've discussed this at the Institute and it's one of the new common fund initiatives. Ultimate goal of this would be to generate renewable community resource of high quality affinity reagents for all human proteins. Such a resource would enable a wide range of applications, some of them are immunoprecipitation based such as for chip studies and protein-protein interaction studies, but also reagents for immunostaining and antibody arrays and so forth. The initial plan is to prioritize monoclonals and initially to start with human transcription factors and immunoprecipitation applications, one could imagine how that could feed into efforts such as those going on in the ENCODE project and that's where that will start, but there's also gonna be encouragement to develop better alternatives than current ways of making affinity reagents. Obviously lots of challenges being considered technical capabilities and the variety of applications that one could imagine. There's issues about scalability, how are we gonna do this with all human proteins eventually and also issues around intellectual property. The next common fund initiative, another new one that we're responsible for is in global health. This one is particularly complicated, in fact at the moment we don't have another institute, we're taking the lead on this at an institute level alone, in part because it doesn't just involve the NIH and this thing now has a name, it's called H3Africa for Human Heredity and Health in Africa. That name was announced at a joint press event that IMC'd at the Welcome Trust in London back in June and Francis came by to represent NIH and Charles Rotimi who was an intramural investigator intramural program who's been heavily involved in helping to formulate the early plans of what has now been named H3Africa, represents a joint venture with the Welcome Trust. And so this is a common fund initiative being jointly funded with the Welcome Trust but also being done in close coordination with the African Society of Human Genetics and so there's a lot of people involved which part of the reason this makes it complicated. Initially, NIH has pledged about $25 million in common fund money over five years. Welcome Trust has so far pledged something on the order of $12 million or so. So we had this big press announcement back in June but that announcement actually came independent of the fact that Charles Rotimi and myself and people in the Welcome Trust had been coordinating some efforts around this really for the better part of a couple of years now starting with a meeting that took place in Cameroon, Africa associated with the last meeting of the African Society of Human Genetics meeting and at that time we didn't even know that Francis was gonna be an NIH director but we were incubating an idea of having such a population based study in Africa and thinking about the complexities you can imagine how quickly it gets complicated and the idea is to do the studies there not to go get samples and do the studies here. And so we set into motion and now just have an official umbrella for some working groups that mostly consist of African scientists to help formulate a plan to give to the Welcome Trust and to us and they had a meeting back in August of this past year or just about last month and this is a photograph of some of the people at that meeting and these two working groups have are putting together some recommendations that will feed into both the Welcome Trust and to us to sort of help get organized to get this out of the gates. We will update you probably at a future council meeting with the details once we understand the details. It's just very complicated at the moment you can imagine doing something with another funding agency, African scientists, African science, a lot of issues around this but we think we're getting some traction but it is a complicated choreography needless to say. Okay, updates from the office of the director and we are, we can almost see the finish line in sight here. New England Journal of Medicine, we have Greg Fero and Alan Gutmacher as series editors of a new series, it's a second such series in genomic medicine. There are gonna be 13 total authors, 13 total articles coming out about every six weeks all these are freely available through an agreement with New England Journal and three of them are out so far and if you haven't seen them, I encourage you to see them and have your students see them because they are terrific. Greg and Alan and Francis did this first one sort of an updated primer or primer if you will. Then the second one is a terrific article that Terry Monoglio wrote on genome-wide association studies and then the third one, Hal Dietz just had this one come out on therapeutic approaches to Mendelian diseases. So again, you can get to links on that from in document 35 but there'll be 13 total coming out every six weeks or so. Our office of director education branch put together or help facilitate, I guess I should say, coordinated with some outside groups as well, a program that brought to NIH in June, 60 very senior judges, very impressive group from all across the country including Hawaii and the Virgin Islands to talk and give a program on genomics, medicine and discrimination. To give you a flavor for this, among these 60 judges, six were chief justices of state Supreme Courts, 20 were associate justices of state Supreme Courts, two federal court judges including the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Judge. They were, this was in a very, just a wonderful group to speak to. I gave an hour, hour 15 minute lecture or something like that and their questions were just fantastic and they were just riveted the whole day. Here's a photograph of them with Bob Lakesley who runs the sequencing group at the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center. They got a tour up close front what sequencing center looks like and it was NHGRI speakers and NIH speakers and even brought in some academic speakers and topics were just what you might imagine they were and it was really terrific so I just wanted to share that with you. Also this summer we once again had what we call our short course, our summer workshop in genomics. It was held in August for 35 participants from 18 colleges and universities. About two thirds of the participating schools are minority serving institutions, five historically black colleges and universities, five Hispanic serving institutions, one tribal college in university and they all bring with them or most of them bring with them trainees and students that we have separate programs for them as well as the general lectures. Some of the students get to go shadow trainees in our labs, in our intramural labs and they get just, I gave a lecture as did a lot of members of our staff gave lectures on different topics. We also this year got involved our NIH Office of Intramural Training and Education to talk about faculty mentoring and offering some input and training about how to teach a diverse group of students especially in areas of science such as genomics. Been some interesting developments around sickle cell. In April many of you may be aware at NCI approved a mandatory testing of athletes for sickle cell carrier status which has lots of interesting issues surrounding and if you're interested in those issues, Vence Bonham in conjunction with Larry Brody one of our intramural investigators joined George Dover of Johns Hopkins to publish this perspective piece in New England Journal which you can get to in document 38 that discusses some of the issues surrounding this and some of the things that are worth considering in this policy. Sickle cell is relevant this year also from the point of view that it's the 100th anniversary of the first description of sickle cell anemia in the Western Medical Literature and so NIH is having a symposium around this event called the James B. Herrick Symposium after the author of that paper and this will take place on the NIH campus in November. We are a co-sponsor along with seven other institutes and centers are involved and Vence Bonham has been quite involved in organizing this and getting speakers and so forth. In terms of other workshops I wanted to mention to you there's two I specifically wanted to mention that we are just in the, oh actually a fairly mature stage of planning. One of them relates to what Alan Gutmacher and I started talking about actually before he was appointed director but still he was acting director and it was a great thing to be talking about was the idea that it just seemed that the meeting of newborn screening as a field with new sequencing technologies and genomic advances was very ripe and yet we weren't sure there was a good research agenda around that interface and so we thought we should have a workshop around that to try to frame a research agenda and I think it's a prototype of the kinds of ways we'll be interacting with the Child Health Institute. So this thing will take place later this year in December and represent sort of a two institute workshop and I could imagine coming out of that might be ideas for funding opportunities maybe that would be jointly pursued by the two institutes. And then I found in sitting at the early meeting that one of the things I got personally confused about and felt undereducated about were a lot of issues around electronic health records, electronic medical records and what the challenges would be as genomic information is starting to be generated about individuals. If you recall for those who are there there was some pretty spirited debate where some people said this is a sales problem and some people say this is a huge problem and I also hear, I mean needless to say the Obama administration has this as a very high priority to get their hands around the development of electronic medical and health records and I sort of felt that we as an institute, we already are but we will increasingly be called into providing input around the genomic aspects of such systems and I felt we needed to be educated better and Wiser, why do I have great people who I respect saying completely contradictory things and a topic that I think is actually very important for us right now. So I put into motion the idea that we should have a workshop about this and so that's been, it's been developed but it's not gonna be until the spring and I think we need to get some traction on this to better understand it and I would imagine we'll be calling on some of you to help us in that workshop or participate in that workshop and think about things down the road that we should be doing to stimulate development to stimulate research in this area. A big event that's gonna take place here in Washington, DC in October is the US Science and Engineering Festival it's gonna take place on the mall downtown also gonna spill over into Freedom Plaza and NIH was asked to participate in a fairly big way as you could imagine being local and once again genome institute are overachievers so disproportionately asked to do more than most other institutes so we're involved in something like six activities all sorts of things of demoing purifying DNA from strawberries and building family trees and genetic traits and all sorts of game show kind of stuff. We're doing a lot but it's fun this is the kind of outreach stuff we should be doing it's local and it's expected to have quite a lot of participation down in the mall especially if the weather's nice. Winding down is needless to say I don't know if you don't know about this I don't know where you've been the last few months but the Deepwater Horizon disaster if you will from late April causing the oil spill really you would think at first blush why does this involve NIH and why does it involve NHGRI and at first that might have been my response but it didn't take long before Francis for example announced that NIH intended to do a long-term study of the cleanup workers as a cohort to be led by NIHS and NIHS and the common fund jointly contributing about $28 million for this over the next five years although they likely would follow these individuals upwards of 10 to 20 years. The focus would be on the cleanup workers because of the likely heavy exposure. Part of this is because there's been very few long-term studies of such individuals who have been involved in such cleanup and there have been some suggestions that maybe there's some genotoxic effects associated with this as well and the plans were also to study other vulnerable populations especially children and pregnant women. Again all this was sort of gonna take place at another institute over there we would be aware of it, unclear we would have to get involved. That sort of kind of changed with a phone call. Terry Minolio was asked to step in and actually co-lead this effort because of her credentials and skills and background along with Harold Jaffe, the CDC. This has had a substantial impact on Terry needless to say there's been a real hero in this that's a bit of a thankless effort and it certainly has had an impact on us because we haven't had Terry as much because she's been completely hijacked by this but it is just one of the things you sort of have to do. We are hoping that there might be some good genetic studies that would come out of this but it's not entirely clear that will be the case or not. I have a feeling Francis might talk a little bit about this so I don't wanna say much more and Terry can tell you all about it in as much gory detail as you want but it is a very complicated multi-agency kind of thing a lot of political overtones so you can imagine it's not a simple thing. I'll also tell you that Chemical Genomic Center was asked to do some work on this as well to study some of the dispersants that were used and look at some of the toxicology associated with those so it was one of these things that one asked we're jumping in but at first you wouldn't have thought we would be involved but indeed we are. I am almost done because I'm not gonna spend a lot of time talking about the intramural program I just want to say a couple of things. I've kept you updated about our undiagnosed diseases program in part because you hear a lot about it because there's been so much news coverage. That news coverage has not let up. Bill Gaul came and told you about it last September. I will just tell you if you wanted to hear the first some just statistics I was recently given about the program by way of reminder of those who don't know this a program where individuals out in the community who have failed the system has failed to give them a diagnosis because of their disease can apply their physician can submit them for consideration in this program that is an NIH wide program at our clinical center but Bill Gaul directs and NHRI hosts but involves clinicians from all different institutes and over the last two years there's been 3000 inquiries so far of individuals about 1200 of them we've accepted the medical records to review and in 280 cases or so the patients have been accepted and either have been brought in or are bringing being brought in and I will also tell you that quite a lot of them now we have a pretty good pipeline going for a whole exome sequencing of patients where we think we can get genetic traction and indeed there's been some nice successes in fact at least couple of them papers are sort of probably likely to be coming out in the next six months where rare disease genes have been identified or where previously implicated disease genes have been implicated in a variant form of the disease that was unrecognizable at the clinical level and until you did the genomics that you really know what was going on at a genetic level. Sanjay Gupta continues to show up about once a month to interview people or to interview Bill or to follow patients and so forth and I guess Bill really made it to the big time because there was a big feature article in People Magazine so it was one thing to be in CNNs but when you hit People Magazine then you know you're someone so in any case actually not a bad story about this one patient that was followed here. In terms of scientific accomplishments in Document 41 just lists some papers and press releases associated with I picked three individuals this time. Colleen McBride had some nice stories and papers coming out on the multiplex project. Ying Zi Yang has some work on a very nice nature paper that just came out about cell polarity and Elaine Ostranders had a couple of very nice dog genetics genomics papers that so those three I just thought I would highlight and you could look at the details under Document 41. So I will stop there. I will tell you that this is a lot of material and a lot of stuff all put together. I wanna give a special thanks to Chris Wetterstrand who helped put this document together which means interface with about 30 other people at the Institute and trying to get them to get everything in on time and get to me and get it organized so that we can get all this stuff posted on the web and it was the first time I was working with Chris on this so thank you and I will stop there.