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Male Speaker: Our final speaker for closing remarks, Dr.
Eric Green, the director of NHGRI, will now address us.
Eric Green: I'm not really the final speaker. I'm just
here to -- just a very brief wrap-up. It's been a terrific symposium, and I don't want
to keep people from lunch. I would make the observation, I can't believe we just had a
panel discussion with Manolis and he barely got a word in edgewise, so I'm actually worried
about him now.
[laughter]
So -- and the second thing -- I had meetings this morning, and I tuned in to a couple of
the talks between them, and what I really wanted to but didn't arrange was, I wanted
my phone to go off about now so I could hand it to Ross and say that it's his mother calling,
because I did catch that part of his -- it was a terrific talk that I heard the last
part of, and then heard the thing about the phone.
But I just wanted to make, really, three comments. First, I wanted to thank, obviously, all the
folks that participated in this, including those among my staff that organized it, but
also all the speakers. I mean, this has been terrific. And I think, as I predicted would
happen, you should have been overwhelmed by the amount of impressive data that's been
generated by modENCODE, and it really gives you new views. I think, the theme of this,
I think, was just sort of new views of genome function. The complexity makes it -- makes
you, you know, sort of awestruck. It also should motivate us to recognize that the work
is far from done, that just what we've discovered in the last handful of years, I predict, we'll
be discovering for decades to come, similar complexities.
The second point I really wanted to make was that it really illustrated something that
Elise introduced in her talk, and that is that modENCODE, by design, like ENCODE and
like many of the things NHGRI does, really is a community resource. And I think what's
particularly gratifying is watching members of the community, some of which who are speakers,
really embrace this as a community resource. And I wrote down, several of them said, you
know, "All of a sudden, I looked at modENCODE data and..." and then interplayed it with
the kinds of studies they were doing. And I think this is exactly accomplishing what
we sought to do with projects like that. And I just think we illustrated it just in the
most highlight-y kind of way in some of the talks we heard at the symposium. But I guarantee
you, if you follow the literature already, or you'll certainly follow it in the future,
you're going to see this playing over and over again. And we're encouraging these investigators
and these consortium to make those connections, to facilitate it, and it even relates to how
the databases are portrayed and so forth, but I really do believe that this community
resource model is the right one, and it is absolutely bearing fruit already and will
continue to.
And the last thing I really want to say is, please, again, I mentioned this, we are video
recording this, and we know from the numbers already that there's many more people watching
this live than are here in the auditorium. Hundreds of people are watching this live.
But what we know from experience is that by video archiving this and then making it available
through our Genome TV channel on YouTube, that this plays out in many, many people's
computers for many months to come, and by that I also want to encourage all of you who
have sat here and watched these talks or anybody listening now to please spread the word among
trainees, post docs, graduate students, other members of your faculty, and elsewhere about
these talks. It'll probably be a couple -- maybe a week or two before we get them posted and
video archived and available, but once they are, you know, this is a great resource, and
we know that probably thousands and thousands of people will watch these talks, and so -- but
I also hope people will get the word out about them.
So, with that, I will draw the symposium to a close. I wish everybody safe travels. If
you're even walking outside of this building, stay cool. It is a crazy hot day out there
today. But I hope everyone gets home safely, wherever your travels might bring you. Thank
you very much.
[applause]
[end of transcript]