 Thanks, Eric. And hello, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here. And as a scientist with a relatively intact short-term memory, the last 30 years has been really amazing to watch what's happened in the world of genomics. And from my perspective as a paleontologist interested in the evolution of all life on this planet, it's been pretty cool to think about what the potential for this is moving forward. As a museum director, I think also of collections that will be generated, and I think of the public that will be served. And museums are interesting places where the public actually interfaces with science in a pleasant brushing sort of way. I mean, most people go to museums once or twice a year, yet the impact, it can be felt in a lifelong way. Lots of scientists, when you talk to them, say, well, how did you get interested in science? And they'll say, well, you know, I went to museum X and saw object B, and then I knew right then I was going to do something in the world of science. So what we do is we catalyze curiosity. We inspire people. It might be a mistake to call it an educational experience. It's more of a life-changing experience. But we do that well at museums. We've done it well for the last 100 years. And one of the things that's interesting for museums is how do museums respond to the rapidly changing world of science in the 21st century? We have a plan with incredible challenges. And how do we as museums get on board with that? And one of the cool things that the leadership at the National Museum of Natural History did before I got there was realize that in Washington, D.C., there are amazing scientific organizations like NIH and many others that are doing incredible groundbreaking research that are not that far away from the mall, as Eric said. So that launched this idea of doing an exhibit on the human genome at the National Museum of Natural History. It opened in June 14th on the mall. It's called Genome, Unlocking Life's Code. And what's interesting about it is that probably most of the people that walk into the building won't know what the word genome means when they walk into the building. Ideally, they will when they walk out of the building. And it's an interesting challenge for us because as you know, the rate of change in science is so fast that it's leaving a lot of people behind. The rate of scientific literacy is not keeping pace with the rate of scientific advancement. So it's places like this where we will introduce people to concepts and inspire them. But we want to trigger their curiosity. This is not going to be a lecture on a wall. It's not a classroom. It's an experience. If you go to a museum and watch what people are doing, it's usually families with children. They're on a social outing. They're going there because they know that it's really interesting. And they think it might be good for them. That's the general premise. I really want to thank Eric Green who really did come up with the idea for this and drove the partnership. And I think it's an inspired thing because partnerships between organizations that create knowledge and organizations that distribute knowledge are really important as we think about the next part of the century where we've got a lot of very interesting complex challenges that probably have scientific, engineering, technical solutions. If we can figure out the politics and the social activities that stitch this stuff all together. We also were very lucky to receive funding from Life Technologies Corporation. It's CEO Greg Lucere who gave us on the order of $4.6 million to fund this exhibit. And that's one of the tricky things about partnerships is there's lots of good ideas. We have great venues but you need to bring the resources to the table to present the actual exhibit to the public. So that's kind of the framework of how this exhibit came to be. I want to take a few moments and explain to you a little bit about what's going on genomically at the Smithsonian Institution because we're a large institution and as I learned applying for the job last year far more complicated than most people realize as are most things in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Institution founded in 1846 based on a bequest by a British fellow who never actually came to the States. He just wanted to increase and diffuse knowledge. Presently consists of 19 museums, nine research institutes, and a national zoo. Many of these buildings are on the mall but not all the museums on the mall are the Smithsonian which is always confusing to people as well. But when you look at, you think Smithsonian, most people think the big museum mall experience in Washington, DC. And it is a big museum mall experience. More than 30,000, sorry, 30 million people a year visit the mall museums in Washington, DC. And most of those people are visiting once in their life or maybe for the first time in their life. So that number 30 million repeats and is unique every year which is pretty amazing to think about the number of people that actually have a museum experience on the mall in Washington, DC. It's the great eighth grade American experience. And we see it in spades in Washington, DC, and the mall in March during spring break. And if you think about that, this is the place where eighth graders come. And if we can trigger that moment of curiosity when they come, when they're in eighth grade, then we turn them over to you guys. That's the game plan. Now, the Smithsonian is far broader than the mall. It exists all over the world. We have research stations everywhere and we've created a number of interesting coalitions and organizations where we're working together. Here's just one example. The Smithsonian Institution Forest Earth Observatory. This started with our group in Panama. We have a number of major units that are far flung, but one is the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama where after the formation of the Panama Canal, we decided it would be good to do some science on the tropics in Panama. And in Panama, we established a 50-hectare plot in a diverse tropical rainforest and mapped every single tree on the plot to watch those trees grow. And you say, well, why do you have to watch trees grow? Well, in the tropics where the seasons aren't well expressed, trees don't make annual growth rings. There's no seasonality that makes the rings. So it's very difficult. The tropics actually know how old a tree is when you cut it down. You cut a tree down in Bethesda. You can count the rings. See, that tree is 67 years old. You cut a tree down in Panama and it looks like butter. There's no growth rings. So the biodiversity of the planet, highly concentrated in the tropics, yeah, we don't know very much about forest dynamics in the tropics. So the Smithsonian set up this plot to watch trees grow. This has now grown to 47 plots in 21 countries and 74 partners. On those plots are 4.5 million trees. And something like 60% of the generic tree diversity of the planet. So on our plots now, we have a pretty good watched sample of the diversity of trees on the planet. We've recently started a similar program with the marine world with the thing called Tenenbaum Marine Observatories where we're putting out plots in the world's oceans to take repeated observations of the health of the oceans. Now in both cases, we started out doing these things using the basic taxonomic science of descriptive morphology that traditionally characterizes museum science. We rapidly have come to realize that genetics and genomics are the way forward to really understand the biodiversity of the planet. Which brings us to the National Museum of Natural History, which is the world's largest natural history museum, but only 10% of the Smithsonian Institution. This is the museum where I am, it's on the mall. It is by far the most visited natural history museum in the world. We get 7.5 million visitors per year. The next closest has 5 million visitors per year. Now what does 7.4 million visitors a year mean? It means that on the last week of March that just passed, we had 380,000 people in the building. Now that's a number that most museums in this country cannot equal on an annualized basis. We do it in a week in March. So we have a lot of people flowing through that space, they're going to see this exhibit and have their first experience of the word genome and maybe get their curiosity catalyzed and think about what the potential is for them in their future. What most people don't realize about museums is that they're not just places that have exhibits about stuff. They're also places that do things. They do scientific research and create new knowledge. They're also places that house the treasured artifacts, objects and scientific data of our culture. Without museums we wouldn't have dinosaurs. Without museums we probably won't have the long term preservation of the biologic tissues that form the basis for much biologic research. So at this museum we have on staff somewhere around 200 scientists, but a scientific community that's far larger because many scientists from around the world come to Washington D.C. to study the collections that we house. We have by far and away the world's largest natural history collections. 127 million objects, hard to conceive. I don't like numbers, I really look at it in terms of volume, but they're vast collections. Those things, the science and the collections are behind the scenes. Most people who come to the museum don't realize that we have science and we have many things. So one of the great potentials for this museum is to shine light on the back of the house. From my perspective the back of the house isn't just what we do at the Natural History Museum or what we do at the Smithsonian, it's what we do with science writ large in the world. And the NIH is a great example of that just up the red line from D.C. Here's an example of where our collections come from, the collections that we house at the National Museum. You can see they come from everywhere collections. We have seven major kinds of collections. And the interesting thing about them all is that, well, at first blush and it all seemed to you to be relevant to genetic and genomic study, I would submit that they all are. For instance, they're anthropological collections, vast collections of ethnology. These collections are, in many cases, made of biologic materials, those materials trace the cultural pathways of the people that built those materials and analyzed the materials and learned about what happened there. We have a parallel project called Recovering Voices which is actually trying to use our material culture to save languages. There's 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. By the end of this century, mostly those will be extinct. And we're working on ways to save and preserve those languages through the use of the material culture. We have vast collections of plants preserved primarily as dry herbarium sheets. And the plant diversity of the plant is staggering. There's somewhere in the vicinity of 400,000 species of plants, we have over 100,000 type specimens of this museum, the original descriptors of these plants. If you want to think about looking at the biodiversity of plants, the genetics of plants, where would you go? You go and look at the actual genetic information that are stored on shelves here in the museum. And of course, with museum collection data that are classified or pickled or stored. We understand that, but realize that it's still there in part. And the study of antique and ancient DNA is a burgeoning and interesting field where we can actually access data from museum collections. We have vast collections of insects. We have vast collections of fossils. And again, you think what are fossils for genetic research, but just think about it, there is a lot of research that has improved. We're all interested to see how far back in time we can take the understanding of DNA and the genetic relationships of organisms. And of course, the genetics of living organisms helps us understand the real history of life, which is manifestly expressed in the fossil record. Minerals, how do minerals have anything to do at all with life on this earth? And it turns out in the last 30 years, there has been a lot of change in civilization and life. And much of what happens in the deep bowels of the planet, the exobiology of this planet is close related to the mineralogy of this planet. Of course, our invertebrate collections, again, dry and pickled collections are vertebrate collections, which are vast. If you think about it, this building on the mall and associated facilities in Maryland called the Encyclopedia of Life. It was a big coalition, the secretary at his house, the museum. The goal here was based on a dream by E.O. Wilson, which was to have a website that had its page for every species on the planet. And when I interviewed for the job, I thought, that's an absurdly ambitious project that will never happen. They said, well, we've already got to 1.1 out of 1.9 million pages already on the website. So they're well on their way. It's just the big idea. You can get to the big idea. And finally, today at the museum have opened our laboratories of analytical biology. It's a 12,000 square foot new genetic next gen sequencing lab in the museum. We have satellite facilities in the National Zoo and in Panama and in Maryland to attack the problem of the genomics of the biodiversity of life. We have a large cryorepository at the facility in Suitland, Maryland, where we are preserving in perpetuity with museum archival skills, the tissues that underpin the study of the biodiversity of life. If you think about this, if you just have a tissue, you can look at the genomics of that tissue. But unless you know the organism from which that tissue came, the downstream use of that knowledge becomes challenging. And with humans, it's not a problem. I mean, human, you're a human. It's no big deal. But when you're talking about 1.9 million species of the planet's diversity, it becomes a real challenge to connect the phenotype with the genotype. And that's what underpins our global genome initiative. So all this to say that we're delighted with the partnership with NIH. Great thanks to Eric Green and Vince Bonham, Francis Cullen, for their support of it. I think it's an innovative new partnership between a major scientific agency and a major public museum. And we're delighted to be part of it. Thanks very much. Thank you, Kirk. And I should point out a couple things about the exhibition. First of all, this would not, Kirk mentioned the fact that life technologies was generous to jumpstart the fundraising for this. This exhibition would never have been possible had it not been from our great partnership with the foundation for NIH, who's been instrumental in raising funds and to be able to do this. And it had involved many, many donations from other major donors. The other thing for those who are interested in coming and visiting the exhibition when it opens in mid-June, it's really easy to remember for especially human geneticists in the audience. It's Hall 23, which is the same number of the pairs of human chromosomes. That's easy to remember. If you're not a human geneticist, just go to the Hope Diamond, which is visited by over 4 million people annually, and take a left. And then you'll come right into our exhibition. So we look forward to seeing you there. It will be resident at the National Museum of Natural History for about 14 months and then starting after that, it will tour North America for about four to five years. So with that as a feel-good story, we're going to now turn our attention to the scientific part of this today's event, and we're going to have now a series of disfabulous talk by just terrific genomic scientists. And this will be started off by Sarah Tishkoff, who's going to talk about African integrative genomics implications for human origins and disease.