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Dr. Eric Green: Good morning everyone and welcome to this
NHGRI-sponsored symposium entitled "Genome Exploration by Large-Scale Sequencing: Circa
2007 and Beyond." This event commemorates the 10th anniversary of the establishment
of the NIH Intramural Sequencing Center of NISC. I'm Eric Green and I am NHGRI Scientific
Director and also NISC's founding and current director and I'll be serving as the host of
today's symposium. But before we launch into our talks by our distinguished group of visitors,
I thought it would be appropriate for me to provide a brief review of NISC’s history
and to also set a context for today's celebration.
This is NIH from an aerial photograph of the main Bethesda campus. We're actually sitting
for our visitors in this building right here, which turns out to be the world's largest
clinical research hospital. The NIH’s on-campus intramural program is a roughly $3 billion
a year research enterprise that is carried out by about 1200 principal investigators.
The diversity of basic and clinical research programs represented on this campus alone
is truly spectacular.
Since its establishment some 14 years ago, the NHGRI intramural programs really has viewed
one of its main reasons and mandate, if you will, is to include and to keep the NIH intramural
program contemporary and cutting edge with respect to genetics and genomics.
Now if we wind the clock back say by 11 years, to 1996, you may recall that those of us in
the genomics community were just figuring out how to sequence complex genomes with plans
then being formulated to accelerate the sequencing of the human genome as part of the Human Genome
Project. At that time, it was already clear that DNA sequencing and sequence analysis
was going to become central to many, many areas of basic and eventually clinical research.
How could this outstanding research institution not have a state-of-the art DNA sequencing
facility?
As a result, I was personally encouraged by the NHGRI leadership, Francis Collins and
then-Scientific Director Jeff Trent, and also by the NIH leadership, then NIH Director Harold
Varmus and the Deputy Director for Intramural Research Michael Gottesman, to consider establishing
a large-scale DNA sequencing program at NIH. I personally had just been recently tenured
at the time. In fact, I was looking for a new challenge and, meanwhile, as many of you
know, I have a bit of energy and so I personally ran with the notion of starting a trans-NIH
sequencing center and, actually, and not surprisingly setting a very aggressive timetable for its
establishment.
Enthusiasm among many of the NIH institutes and centers was actually quite high, and in
a matter of months we had resource commitments from 14 institutes and centers to start the
NIH Intramural Sequencing Center. Space is always a challenge at NIH, especially here
on the main campus, and so we searched for space options off-campus. Jim Battey, who's
actually here in the second row today, was then the Scientific Director of the National
Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders and he generously offered us temporary
space in their Gaithersburg, Maryland facility, so that we could open NISC’s doors quickly
in 1997.
In short order, we got started which meant we hired an initial staff of about six people
and converted this storage closet into a room to house our six brand-new ABI model 377 sequencing
instruments. Of course, it turns out we first had to install an air conditioning unit in
the ceiling to handle the cooling for a room that previously housed broken down equipment
and other archived junk, but we were up and running.
Within the year, we moved to our first real home in this refurbished building also in
Gaithersburg that formerly was the home of the company BRL, which later became Life Technologies.
More space meant more people, although we were still a modest sized group.
From the beginning, NISC benefited from terrific relationships with our colleagues at the other
major sequencing centers, who generously shared their expertise and always welcomed us to
visit their centers to learn about the latest technologies and developments. We've always
felt to be a part of this community of sequencing centers so even back then we honored them
in our lab by keeping track of their respective times at the University of Washington, at
Baylor College of Medicine, Washington University, Whitehead Institute and the Sanger Center.
We even kept track of the dark side: Celera Genomics [laughter], although note our belief
that they were routinely 20 minutes behind the rest of us.
Now as sequencing projects came in, mostly from NIH collaborators, we were able to expand
our staff slightly but we then earned the opportunity to participate in some major genomics
projects, including the Mouse Genome Sequencing Initiative, the Cancer Genome Anatomy Project
and eventually the Mammalian Genome Collection and, as a result, our scientific efforts were
able to grow, and so did our staff, and even our space. But eventually we outgrew our first
real home, and so it was once again time to move on to get more space: in this case to
a building being constructed for various NIH groups in Rockville, Maryland. This ugly structure
eventually became this beautiful building where NISC has made the top floor its second
and current home.
Now our current space has the look and feel of a modern research facility and gives NISC
the kind of long-term home that it deserves. Within this new building, we deliberately
constructed a very large laboratory to house the NISC production operation, never imagining
that we would actually fill it up but, guess what? We have, although we find its flexibility
and its design extremely accommodating to the changing landscape of DNA sequencing,
especially as technologies evolve.
And with our additional space and the expanding nature of NISC scientific pursuits, our staff
has grown as well, and so shown here is the current NISC staff and some of the extended
collaborative NHGRI family at a recent off-site retreat.
Over the past 10 years, NISC has routinely acquired the necessary tools and technologies
to operate a first-rate DNA sequencing program. Our abilities to stay at the cutting edge
of large-scale sequencing have been aided by those interactions and collaborations with
the other major sequencing centers, many of whose directors are among our featured speakers
today. I wanted to include them in today's symposium, both because of the outstanding
science they have to describe to you, but also because I want to personally extend my
own thanks to them for their collaborative generosity and their remarkable spirit. It
truly is a great community to be a part of.
So here we are today, roughly 10 years, millions and millions of sequence reads and numerous
projects, collaborations and publications later. It has been a fabulous first decade
for NISC. So what do you do to celebrate being 10 years old? Well, according to my two children,
ages seven and 11, there's only one thing to do. You have a birthday party. And that
is what today is: a good, scientific party to celebrate NISC's 10th and to celebrate
genomics and DNA sequencing and the awesome future horizons associated with these areas
of research.
Coming up with the guest list for this party was relatively easy. First, I invited all
the current and even some former NISC staff: an incredibly proficient and professional
group. I wanted all of them to partake in this symposium as a tribute to their dedication
and their accomplishments and, in fact, I would actually just like to start this morning
by asking all the NISC staff, current and former, to please stand up and get a round
of applause.
[applause]
Second, we've invited the entire NHGRI family, the whole NIH community and even various other
local colleagues. I think, as you'll see, as the day progresses, enthusiasm is really
going to be quite high for this party. But, of course, any good party requires good entertainment,
and for that, we have the very best in the nine speakers that will follow. Collectively
they represent nothing short of an all-star group of genome scientists, admittedly heavily
enriched from friends and collaborators of NISC. After all, who invites non-friends to
your birthday party?
So among the many things I expect you will gain from today's symposium is a profound
appreciation of the exciting landscape that still exists in the arena of genome exploration
by large-scale sequencing.
So 11 years ago, when Collins and Varmus and Trent and Gottesman and even Green discussed
the rationale for establishing NISC, it was very much predicated on the belief that the
need for large-scale DNA sequencing would not end when the Human Genome Project was
over. Rather, it would massively increase in ways that we could not even predict at
that time. I hope that today's symposium will show you that our collective expectations
were indeed correct, and that the most exciting developments in DNA sequencing are still to
come. So thank you very much. Enjoy the day.