 So that brings us to the end of the concept clearance activities in this meeting. The next agenda item is council initiated discussion. This is the time on the agenda where we open it up for council members to raise any questions or issues that they may wish to ask us about. It's also the time where we do a little preview of the next council meeting and give you a sense for what's coming up and what agenda items you might like to add to the September meeting. So let me just first ask if there are any questions that are other than the September agenda or issues that people want to ask about. Sitting here, I must admit a lot of the science I'm having trouble with. But when we talked this morning about the amount of funds needed for just gathering this information and storing it somewhere, and I think one of the slides said it's important that funders start kicking into this pot. On the flip side, we have increasing requirements of communicating with potential human subjects and informed consent notification becoming bigger and bigger. I can tell you the ongoing discussion of return of research results and incidental findings is suggesting that low and behold, a long-term relationship with research participants is something they were going to have to consider. In my mind, I'm bucketing all of this as the infrastructure of just doing research. As we're sitting here with less and less money, the amount of requirements for the business of doing research, to my mind, is an incredibly steep curve. And I'm probably not identifying all of the issues that are there. But I think at some point, just the way this single institute, it's obviously trans-NIH, but we're having to look at these in very, very different ways. And my lens to the IRB piece is how can we possibly say all this research can go forward when we have no idea where those resources are coming from? So I guess I'm babbling on, but that is an issue I think would be an interesting one to talk about. I had a thought on this subject. A lot of the, I think the same issues have been coming up on the informatics side this morning. And I was just wondering if it's worth considering from a longer term, a more strategic point of view, this might be the type of problem that is solved more efficiently at a larger scale. So many years ago, the genome centers were set up to do sequencing more efficiently. And I wonder whether the time is coming to try and tackle some of these large-scale informatics issues along those lines. It seems to me there could be a lot of commonality. And when you talk about other institutes, it's perhaps the case that if you set up the infrastructure in this way that people at other institutes, other projects, R01 and so on, could budget appropriately and make use of more of a center-type resource. You can think of it as a cloud-type resource. Mark, I want to make sure I understand what you're saying. Are you implying that some of these informatics computational database issues should be looked at broader than NHGRI? And you mean at NIH level, if that's what you're saying? Or did you mean something else? I meant something else. I meant that there are many aspects of the informatics issues that are all related to each other. And that perhaps they could be, and you've got different DACs and individual PIs and so on, trying to solve the same issues at many levels of scale. And I'm just thinking that in some sense, as Pearl mentioned, this is sort of a common infrastructure that one can make use of. And so what I was suggesting was that it might be worth thinking of this on a much larger scale within NHGRI. This perhaps could be done along the same conceptual lines as genome centers have been thought of to, I guess, for one of a better word, sort of industrialize the process of generating data. But instead of that, I think tackle what is becoming even much more difficult problem. The process of handling data of not necessarily the end stage of study specific analysis, but everything in between. How do you appropriately store it? How do you do this? How do you do just the routine computation on it? At what point do you throw data away? At what point do you...? All of these things seem to me perhaps may be done much more cost effectively if you put together a critical mass of people whose job it is to do that. And then that type of center could potentially become a resource like Amazon provides a cloud resource. They can do it much more efficiently than any individual small group can because of this efficiency of scale. So other people can plug into the Amazon cloud. Even individual PIs could plug into this sort of center level resource and could help fund it. Anyone in any institute could make use of such a compute resource, let's call it that. But it's not just a stack of disks and CPUs. As we've talked about, there has to be a lot more around that useful. So I think Mark raises the obvious question. And this was in fact the subtext of the meeting that we had last week and that we spent a day and a half discussing. And I think that some of the next steps that Peter was describing and talking about is exactly to get different groups of people to think in more detail about it. I mean, ostensibly the meeting was about the short read archive, but it wasn't really about the short read archive at all. It was about how are we going to handle the storage and management and at some level distribution in the way you're talking about of the large amounts of data that are being generated, not just in the big projects like TCGA and 1000 Genomes and ENCODE, but also, I mean, it's been brought up here a couple of times, that kind of data that's now also coming out of individual investigator labs. So I think you're absolutely right. And I just want to emphasize that that really was the subtext of that meeting and people are trying to think about it. The bottom line is that it's going to cost money. And whether that money comes from the center, because this is an NIH issue, it's not just an NHGRI issue, whether it comes from the center, whether it comes from the institutes themselves, wherever it comes from, it's kind of a zero sum game, so something else is going to have to give, so to speak. And I will stress that the broad issue of computational biology is being looked at at the NIH level, but it's not going very quickly. And there's lots of reasons for that, because there's a lot of other crazy things going on, but the fact of the matter is on multiple occasions I have been told by Francis Collins and others that when that really gets traction, they keep saying, and we really want to rely on your counsel, because it's one of the most knowledgeable counsels we have. And I do think we will get engaged. The problem is it's just been moving very slowly. And so in fact, I'm hardly involved yet. We do have some people on staff that are involved in some of the feeder committees and working groups that are going to eventually feed up. I will tell you, you know, I'm not sure we can, maybe this almost speaks to what you're partially implying. I'm not sure we can totally wait for an NIH-wide global plan, because that may be too slow in coming together. And in some ways, I think Jill is right. It was like we didn't really need an excuse to have another meeting, but the meeting that recently happened, there were lots of issues that are bubbling through it, and it was just, you know, it was just because of the most recent crisis, quote-unquote, that made us quickly convenant. Go ahead, Mark. Well, I think if almost by definition, if you want to make a global plan, it's going to be slow. You have to think about everything. And I think there is the potential perhaps to help that effort, even by making this a much more narrow NHGRI-specific type of focus on dealing with the next-gen sequencing data. It's something that could help inform this broader, slower discussion. The need is pretty urgent, and it seems to me if you constitute it much more narrowly, it could be something that could potentially be yielding benefits on a much shorter timescale. I'm not sure it's a zero-sum game. I think that if you look at the cost of doing this, you know, across NHGRI and across NIH, I suspect there may well be some economies that can be realized. I heard you say center, and then I'm sort of thinking of some big group to do it. But I also hear you saying, you know, new creative ideas for how to deal with next-gen sequencing. Then I'm thinking almost a technology development program of smaller grants. Which of those do you mean, or do you mean a little bit of both? I'm in a center. Do you mean a center? But I don't think it precludes the other. I'm just thinking that there would need to be significant discussion on what such a center, the remit of that center, what specifically its activities would be, what problems exactly it's going to solve. I think there's enough of those that one can, pretty big menu, one can choose from that some things that are really actionable over the next year or two and yielding benefit quite quickly. If one doesn't get carried away and try and make it too big and too amorphous. I think that's a really important point because there's been a lot of discussion about our shortfall in informatics, our shortfall in computational biology. Those are fairly broad terms. And I think it's hard for me to think about a one-size-fits-all computational center that's going to be able to effectively address this. We find even clusters that are directed towards doing phenotype algorithms need to be tuned differently from clusters that are focused on doing sequence analysis. So there's a lot of detail that needs to be thought about. And so I like the idea very much of defining this much more narrowly and saying, when we talk about large data sets, are we really talking about sequence data? Or maybe starting with a focus on sequence data is a good place to start in trying to solve that problem. And in that there may be lessons learned that help with all the modern code data and all the encode data and all the phenotype data that's coming down the road. But I think we do need to have some real clarity when we talk about computational biology, informatics, about what the scope of that is, because the scope of those fields is huge. So, Pearl... This... The conversation... We'll now talk about informatics. But if I understood you correctly, you're sort of saying that these other required costs of research, which are still now being treated as an unfunded mandate, could... are sort of on the same trajectory and we want to try and address them before they too come to a crisis situation. Right. I think the discussion this morning, the informatics I think is just a great example. But I think there are many others. We were talking about the emerge, et cetera, you know, putting things in the electronic medical record, this desire for a central mechanism, that exact same discussion is going on with the return of research results. And we already said it's too much money for the clinical side. We'll just think about it for the research side where it's every week there's new data. So it's just to have an eye on, I think all of the things that now go into the business of doing research and who is going to pay for it. And, you know, for each of us at an institution, how can you say you have... how can you sign off that this in fact is a doable project given the funds you have? We have all these competing requirements. I'm very sensitive to what Pearl has just mentioned, but it just occurs to me from some of the data you've shown us that this institute's sequence is much less than many of the other institutes. So why is this unique? Is this the place where we want to take the leadership role, which is arguably maybe that's why we should do it, or is this something that NIH, other institutes, needs to really also get involved because this research infrastructure question is not unique. Well, I can give a lot of answers to that question. The first thing I point out is one of the things that we will be struggling with, to be quite honest, and Pearl's pointing right at it, is even human subjects' research is becoming a bigger and bigger... besides all the costs associated with it, just if you read our strategic plan, you sort of point us where we're likely heading, it's going to become a much more prominent part of what we do. And yet, I mean I say that, and yet we're a teeny, teeny, teeny, teeny little fraction of human subjects' research funded by NIH. In fact, those curves probably can barely even see us graphed. It's so low. So certainly the only difference is any of the nuances brought on by genomics research, which I don't know how significant we think that is contributing to the larger expense that we're going to have to be dealing with. With respect to your point directly, Jeff, thinking about sequence data, if we don't attempt to lead, I mean sort of we're still leading in sequencing technology and we still have the best funded groups doing sequence. So I still think it's probably the expectation is that we will provide a good part of the intellectual leadership. The problem is we have to know what to do and we have to have enough resources to make a difference and so we will do that best we can and we will participate heavily in any NIH-wide discussions. But I don't think we can say somebody else has to lead. I think that's just not tenable. I think it's way too much expected that we will be heavily at the front of the line with a lot of voice and a small wallet, but yeah. Well, I think that same model, just judging from what's going out of my institution, is playing out all over the place since we're generating large-scale sequencing data, we're viewed as a group that should take the lead in computational biology, computer. We're supposed to know about the cloud, all that kind of stuff. And I mean the same kinds of questions that were brought up earlier in the day come to us just simply because we're in genetics, which doesn't necessarily make sense. Other topics? I mean obviously we need to follow up. For the September agenda, is that what you're asking about? Oh no, I think... I was asking in general, I can bring up the September agenda whenever you're ready. Sounds like you're ready. So as far as I can tell, or we can tell, the September Council meeting is going to be very heavily devoted to reviewing grants, grant applications. We have several major RFAs that are being addressed. The four sequencing RFAs, the applications will be coming to Council. Eric earlier mentioned the production for the Protein Capture Common Fund project. We have two RFAs on the street now addressing the issue of return of results in studies. Those will be coming to September Council and then there is a set of something like 10 resource applications, databases, and other kinds of resources which will have to be reviewed at September Council as well. So it seems to me like the bulk of the activity at September will be on grant-related closed session items. So to me it's looking like the open session in September will be very minimal, maybe even just the director's report unless there are other topics that are screaming for attention. And then we'll just go and have as long a closed session as possible. I think we'll still be able to do it if we devote most of Monday and much of Tuesday to closed session. So if that's agreeable, if there aren't any pressing scientific issues you want to hear about as open session presentations, I think we could probably not do project updates, not necessarily do meeting reports and things like that. I don't know if we'll have any concept clearances if there are, we'll have to do those in open session. But that's what September Council looks like to me right now. Any comments? Inevitably a lot could happen in four months and we may have to add things. So it'll be very surprising to me if the only thing in open session is director's report, but we'll see. Okay. So if not, if that's, there aren't any other issues to bring up, then I'll have to get back to the agenda, the live agenda. There are just remaining to call to your attention some announcements and items of interest which are listed on the open session agenda. There's a report to council from the American College of Medical Genetics. There's the quarterly report from the National Science Society of Genetic Counselors, which I'll call to your attention. I'll also mention that we received too late to put on the agenda, but there is an update for council report to council from the genetic alliance, which we didn't hand out because it wasn't available completely publicly to people who would be watching the video cast. There are copies outside for any council members who are interested and we probably will go ahead and amend the open session agenda to put that on as well. Any other items of interest that anyone wants to mention? If not, it's time for the conflict of interest statement and then we will end the open session. So in anticipation of what's going to happen in closed session, we have to read the following, make it clear to you the following statement about conflict of interest. You must leave the meeting room when applicants submitted by your own organization are being individually discussed. In the case of state higher education or other systems with multiple campuses geographically separated, own organization is intended to mean the entire system except where determination has been made that the components are separate organizations for purposes of conflict of interest. You should avoid situations that could give rise to charges of conflict of interest whether real or apparent. For example, you should not participate in deliberations and actions on any application from or involving a recent student, a recent teacher, a professional collaborator with whom you've worked closely, a close personal friend, or a scientist with whom you have had longstanding scientific or personal differences. The NHGRI staff will determine the appropriate action based on the recency, frequency, and strength of such associations or interests either positive or negative and will instruct you accordingly. Please sign the conflict of interest in the disposal of confidential materials forms which have been provided to you. They'll be collected at the end of the meeting. And with that, I think we've reached the end of the open session. Do you want to slam your gavel? Why don't you wait until we actually reconvene in closed session? Associate to 15 minute break.