 Bienvenue à tous, c'est vraiment un plaisir d'avoir cette conférence d'impressif en biologie ici à THS. La première chose que j'aimerais dire, c'est vraiment de remercier l'organisateur François Kepes, Michel Gromov et Nadia Morozova. Je voudrais aussi remercier Elisabeth Jassron, qui a fait un travail merveilleux de l'organisation, et aussi le comité scientifique, les parleurs, et nous avons un bon liste de parleurs, et probablement aussi la discussante, qui est une bonne notion introduite peut-être par Misha, et je pense vraiment que c'est une bonne façon d'organiser une conférence, et j'espère que les discussions que vous avez entre les biologistes et les mathématiciens seront très effrayantes. Donc, je voudrais peut-être expliquer un peu ce qu'est l'IHS, parce que peut-être l'IHS n'est pas sur la map de la biologie, en général. Donc, en quelques mots, l'IHS a été créé en 1958 par un industriel, Leon Machin, qui voulait créer un institut sur le modèle de l'Institut pour l'Advance Study en Princeton, donc il voulait avoir une fondation privée, et l'idée était d'avoir le scientiste à la hausse niveau en mathématique et en physique théorique, au début, et d'avoir un programme de visiteurs. Donc, c'était un bon succès depuis le début, parce qu'il pouvait attraquer un scientiste vraiment prominent, et par exemple, à la hausse de 10 mathématiciens à la hausse de l'Institut, nous avons appris à la hausse de 7 mathématiciens, comme Grotendie, René Thaum, or Misha, ici, et d'autres, donc, autour de ce petit collège de professeurs permanents, nous avons des scientistes de CNRS, aussi, à la hausse niveau, et nous avons appris un très grand programme de visiteurs. Donc, chaque année, nous avons appris à plus de 200 visiteurs de tout le monde, et cela fait quelque chose de 500 mois de visiteurs, et pour l'exemple, l'une troisième est américaine, donc nous sommes vraiment internationaux dans cet aspect, et pour l'exemple, dans les derniers 10 ans, nous avons appris à 60 différentes nationalités. Donc, nous espérons que nous pouvons créer une atmosphère de discussion, et j'espère que vous pourrez ressentir cette atmosphère pendant cette conférence. Notre structure est vraiment une fondation privée dans l'intérêt du public, et nous sommes soutenus par le gouvernement français, qui nous a donné la moitié de notre budget à l'année annuelle, mais nous sommes aussi soutenus internationaux par des principales agences scientifiques, comme NSF, ERC, le Fonds de la Suisse, le Schaft, ou le gouvernement belge. Et pendant les années, nous avons également pu créer un fonds indomètre, qui nous représente avec l'intérêt de 20 % de notre budget. Donc, nous sommes principalement orientés à l'aspect théorique dans le math et la physique théorique, mais nous avons essayé d'avoir un œil sur la biologie, et je pense qu'on a commencé avec René Thaum, qui est un professeur permanent ici, donc, après un travail important pour la théorique, la théorie et la géométrie différenciée, il a essayé de créer la base de mathématiques pour morphogène, est-ce? Et je pense que le next step for the Institute was Misha, who, after an infinite number of contributions to mathematics, started to be really fascinated by biology, and wanted to contribute to theoretical aspects of biology, and he tried to have here a group of people able to interact with biology, and to organize some seminars to invite some very top-level biologists and institute and to maintain a discussion between mathematicians and physicists. Another aspect is to try to do this by organizing this kind of conference, and so I am really glad to see that this kind of conference attracts a lot of people, and I would like to really welcome you and hope you will have a wonderful week here. Everybody, good morning, I'm not François Kepès. For two minutes, I'll be representing Pierre Tambourin, who is the head of Genopal, and so I'll say a few words on what is Genopal and where the cooperation between Genopal and IHES originate. So first of all, Genopal is a premier biotech and biotherapy cluster in France, and possibly in Europe, with over 80 companies and 20 academic labs and 20 technological platforms. It's located in Paris area, in the southern suburbs of Paris, and has been involved with systems biology since 1999, and in synthetic biology since 2005, notably with the first network of scientists in synthetic biology. Among other things, and companies which are interested or using or applying synthetic biology, the Institute of Systems and Synthetic Biology has been created there, in Genopal, founded in 2007, and the first synthetic biology platform, called APSTIN, was founded there as well in 2009, and I should perhaps mention also a master degree in systems and synthetic biology, which started in 2009 as well. So now a word on the cooperation between the Institute de Hauts études scientifiques IHES and Genopal since at least 2000, as far as I can say, was based on, I believe, on the realization that there is a need for cross-disciplinarity in the new type of biology that was starting with genomics, and based also on the fact that the School of Mathematics in France is very strong. And so it started there, as Dr Ulmo has said, with a cycle of seminars, and also with some conferences. And I believe that this is both appealing to biologists in this transdisciplinary setting, but also to mathematicians in different ways, inspiration and direct contributions as well. So in some sense, this conference beautifully illustrates this cooperation. Now, I'm François Képez, and I'd like to say that this cooperation was also illustrated in some sense with, by the scientific friendship between Misha and me and others during all these years. And this conference or the idea of this conference originates from Misha's, really from Misha initially. After some discussions that also included later the members of the scientific committee, we converged on the notion that we could use this conference for a critical assessment of synthetic biology, its status, its implicit groundings, and more specifically, through an examination of what was the status of its keywords, or should I say buzzwords, related to engineering. So this is a good occasion for me on our behalf to thank all the scientific committee members who worked very hard to prepare this conference, and some of them, fortunately, can be with us, and will be chairing sessions. Of course, we'll thank the speakers, but we'll thank them even more after the speeches. Thank the Mathematician Discussants who can possibly get some inspiration from this conference, but will undoubtedly ask disturbing questions. Beware of that. Thank Nadia Morozova, who helped us organize the conference, as a scientist based here at IHS. Of course, Elisabeth Jassron and her colleagues for what they did on the logistics sites, the poster, the web pages, and many of you have interacted with Elisabeth about their own, the preparation of their own trip. And finally, I'd like to mention and thank our sponsors, of course, foremost as IHS, but I'd like to thank Jean-Paul, the Conseil Regional Regional Council of the Paris Area, Conseil Regional, Ile-de-France, the Institute Complex Systems of Paris Area, ESC, the LabX of Mathematics, Jacques Ademard, and also the European Systems Biology Network, which has been directed by Udo Rachel, who is part of this committee, and me during eight years, and is ending at the end of this month. And in some sense, I think we hope it's going to be a very nice ending to this eight-year network of systems biology, and to be sure a lot of the ideas that I have in mind, or I had in mind as I was preparing this conference, also came from discussions over the years with Udo Rachel. So now, I'd like to hand over to Misha Grumov to say a few words. You see, in the scientific building downstairs, there is a room, Leon Machin, where those who want may have little subcessions, and there is a paper board where you can write in pencil. So if you want to have some meeting and some group, et cetera, just to schedule to fix it, yeah. That's just practical, and generic just again for biologists to have an idea why mathematicians are here, and so what brought this meeting. And the background to the starting point, but now, of course, diverged, was that, you know, there are these emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and of course, for mathematicians, a great problem. What to do that? It's really fun. Yeah, we're helping a bad thing, having humanity. For mathematicians, potentially, very interesting. How the hell to handle it. And we, mathematicians, believe we can't solve any problem, but we cannot solve it, of course. But at least we can pretend we participate in this listening to biologists. And so you're just here to convince us that it's an interesting problem, and maybe we can say a couple of words again. Imagining we help to solve it. And that's... And also, I wanted to mention one of the things we can talk about, to actually make the major part of the work, defining all these great people coming here.