Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Rudy Pozzatti: So we're now onto the part of council called
-- that we call council initiated discussion. Up until now we've been force-feeding you
information that we think will be of interest to you and good for you --
[laughter]
-- and this is your chance to push back on us and tell us you've waited until 4:35 for
us to give you the floor. We've used this time to solicit ideas, things that you want
to draw to our attention, maybe issues that we're not paying enough attention to, or topics
that you might want to hear the institute report back to you on --
Male Speaker: Please pardon the interruption. Your conference
contains less than three participants at this time.
Rudy Pozzatti: Hang up.
Male Speaker: If you would like to continue, press *1 now,
or the conference will be terminated.
Rudy Pozzatti: Please terminate the conference. So, Eric's
actually going to run this. The floor is open.
Eric Green: Joe.
Joe McInerny: Eric, something's been nagging at me all afternoon
that Jill pointed out, and although I'm not in this field, I've heard a lot today about
big data and bioinformatics, and how we're going to have to train all these people, yet
I saw that, given the variants, a little slight dip in the bioinformatics support or funding,
and I wonder if that, in part, isn't due to what you pointed out on your slide was these
open positions, two open positions, in fact, for staff to really put forward the initiatives.
Maybe in that -- is that part of the potential dip?
Eric Green: I -- Jeff, you may want to move closer to
a microphone because I'm going to ask you to make a comment.
Male Speaker: [inaudible]
[laughter]
Eric Green: You deserve -- by the way, I-- but I do want
to point -- I do want to point out that analyses like the ones you're referring to, they have
error bars around them because a lot of it is a function of how we're coding, you know,
grants and parts of our portfolio and all that. So, you know, I'm -- but I'll look to
other senior leadership here to weigh in, I don't think there's any systematic decline
in our investment. I mean, I don't -- I'm not claiming that it's on the uptick. I think
it's pretty -- I think it's pretty steady state, but, as I'm going to ask Jeff to comment
in a minute, I mean, there have been issues around our ability of just being able to tread
water in that area with enough program director folks working on stuff.
And I'll also point out that -- and also to be fair, that the last -- boy, it's enormous
-- the better part of the last year, we have been -- me, starting with me, Mark Guyer,
and then about three or four of our bioinformatics programs after that have really been pulled
into this BD2K initiative at the NIH level to stand it up. And so even though -- with
none of the spare time that anybody had, that almost became -- and especially over the summer,
I can tell you, just last summer, just huge amounts of work. So I think there's a lot
of it, and those aren't excuses, but I actually don't think there's a real decline, but I
-- it's also not a growth area. It hasn't been even though we need it to me. It's one
of the reasons why we're advertising two positions. But, Jeff?
Male Speaker: So, Joe, you're absolutely right. And we have
a bandwidth problem. And Teri alluded to it in terms of the genomic medicine program and
the genomic sciences program, I would posit, has more -- when we're running a lot of very
large programs, complicated programs, the people who have the best ability to contribute
to the development of the next program on, and some of these got kicked to FY '15 because
we couldn't finish them in FY '13 or '14.
Male Speaker: It may be a very difficult hire.
Male Speaker: We have a bandwidth problem, right?
Male Speaker: [inaudible]
Male Speaker: Will be difficult hires, yes. Yeah, and that's
why we need your help. [laughs]
Eric Green: Other comments, thoughts, things you want
to see at -- where are we, in May -- as September council topics, September or next February?
Well, we've either satisfied them or exhausted them, or both.
[laughter]
Female Speaker: Eric?
Eric Green: Yeah, Jill.
Female Speaker: I just want to emphasis the informatics portfolio
strategy comment that I made early this morning as a possible -- do I have to go through the
whole thing again?
Eric Green: No. No.
Female Speaker: As a possible topic for either September or
February.
Eric Green: Yeah. No, no, it's -- we've got it.
Female Speaker: Yeah, well --
Eric Green: And we will follow-up. We want to make sure
we have all the right information --
Female Speaker: No, no, I understand, I just --
Eric Green: -- to make it good.
Female Speaker: -- think there is a little bit of urgency
because of what else is going on in NIH.
Eric Green: Okay. Nothing else? Okay. Back to you, Rudy.
Rudy Pozzatti: All right. So, a couple more things to do
before with close out the open session. It's my duty to draw to your attention a couple
of things that you can find in the electronic council book. The first is a quarter report
-- sorry, wrong page. Now we'll go to the -- so the document itself. There's a report
on administrative actions, again, found in the electronic council book. I think in this
case there are three supplements that were made to NHGRI grants. The next is the funding
actions from the most recent council. That would refer back to what we talked about in
February, what we reviewed, what you approved in February. You can see the list of awards
that have been made there. And the last is the expedited council concurrence report.
The three members there are Howard, Amy, and who's my third person on it? Jim. Okay. These
are largely SBIR and STTR applications that were reviewed this round. The three of them
looked them over and reviewed them, gave feedback to the Institute, and allows the Institute
to start on a rapid pace to make awards sooner than later, and, again, in that report you'll
see the list of awards that we propose to make. Okay. The last thing is the reading
of the conflict of interest, and Monica, do you want to bring Comfort in? Okay, she's
ready to go.
Female Speaker: The presentations from today's open session,
there're a lot of presentations that we don't have available yet.
Male Speaker: Yeah, they're on the open --
Rudy Pozzatti: So, the presentations are being sent to me
right now. I've gotten a couple of them. We will post them on the website. You can go
to the agenda, and they'll be clickable there, okay?
All right, so at your desk in the folders, or at your places at the folders, there should
be a copy of the conflict of interest form. I'll ask you to pull it out and sign it, and
Comfort will come around and collect it from you, but I'm going to read the chant. "This
will certify that in the review of applications conducted by the National Advisory Council
for Human Genome Research, on February 11 and 12, 2013, I absented myself and did not
participate in the discussion of, nor vote on, any application in which I or to my knowledge,
my spouse, child, or close professional associate has a financial interest, nor on any application
from an organization or institution where I am an employee, consultant, officer, director,
or trustee, or am negotiating for employment, or otherwise have a financial interest. In
council actions on which we voted on a block of applications without discussing any individual
one, the so-called unblock actions, my vote did not apply to any application from any
institution fulfilling the criteria in the preceding paragraph." So say we all. So please
sign that form, and unless I've missed something, I think we're done with the open session.
And do you want to gavel us into a transition to --
Eric Green: Is that what time we're going to reconvene?
We will take a break until, why don't we say, right to 5:00?
Rudy Pozzatti: How about five till 5? I think we can clear
the room by then.
Eric Green: All right. So we will close the open session,
and let's plan to just take a break now for about five minutes, and we will reconvene
at five minutes to 5. And we'll probably go about, what, an hour or so? Isn't that about
our plan?
Male Speaker: No, yeah.
Rudy Pozzatti: I hope closer to 45 minutes, but it all depends
on how talkative you are.