Kirk Johnson: 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. 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 planet 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 Natural Museum
of Natural History. It will open 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 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 inspiring thing, because partnerships between organizations
that create knowledge and organizations that distribute knowledge are really important
as we think about the next part of this 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 attributes, it should stitch itself all together. The
-- we also -- we're very lucky to receive funding from Life Technologies corporation
and its CEO, Greg Lucier, 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 D.C.
[laughter]
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 D.C., and it is a big museum Mall experience.
More than 30,000 -- sorry, 30 million people a year visit the Mall museums in Washington
D.C., 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 ever year, which is
pretty amazing to think about the number of people who actually have a museum experience
on the Mall in Washington D.C. It's the great 8th grade American experience --
[laughter]
-- and we see it in spades in Washington D.C. on the Mall in March, during spring break.
If you think about that, this is the place where 8th 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.
[laughter]
That's the game plan.
Now, the Smithsonian is far brighter 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, the trees don't make annual growth rings. There's no seasonality
that makes the rings, so it's very difficult in the tropics to actually know how old a
tree is when you cut it down. You cut the tree down in Bethesda, you can count the rings,
say, "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, yet we don't
know 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 with 74 partners. On those
plots are 4.5 million trees, and something like 60 percent 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, a
thing called Tannenbaum Marine Observatories. 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 percent 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, 7.4 or 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 are going to 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 they're not just places that have exhibits
about stuff; they're also places that do things, that 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
biological 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 that 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 of the people who
come to the museum don't realize that we have science and collections. They think we're
about exhibits. We're about all three things.
So one of the great potentials for this museum is to shine light on the back of the house.
Through 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 in
the national museum. You can see they come from everywhere on the planet. Just a glance
at some of the collections. We have seven major kinds of collections, and the interesting
thing about them all is that, well, at first blush they might not all seem to you to be
relevant to genetic and genomic study. I would submit that they all are. For instance, our
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 objects. We can actually extract those materials, analyze the materials,
and learn 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 planet is staggering. There's somewhere in the vicinity of 400,000
species of plants. We have over 100,000 type specimens at this museum, the original descriptors
of these plants. If you want to think of looking at the biodiversity of plants, the genetics
of plants, where would you go? You go and actually look at the actual genetic information
that are stored on shelves here in the museum. And, of course, with museum collections, you
have challenges related to the fact that much biologic tissue is dried, 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 fossil DNA
extracted from things like frozen mammoths, and as techniques improve, 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 at all to do with life on this earth?" And it
turns out, in the last 30 years we've learned that the mineral diversity of this planet
is quite diverse relative to other planets, and there is, in many cases, some very interesting
relationships between mineralization and life. And much of what happens in the deep bowels
of the planet, the exobiology of this planet, is closely related to the mineralogy of this
planet.
Of course, our invertebrate collections; again, dried and pickled collections. Our vertebrate
collections, which are vast. If you think about it, this building on the Mall, and associated
facilities in Maryland, are one of the great warehouses of the Earth's biodiversity. We
have attacked this by putting together a project called The Encyclopedia of Life. It was a
big coalition, the secretary and his house in the museum. The goal here was based on
a dream by E. O. Wilson, which was to have a website that had a page for every species
on the planet, and when I interviewed for the job I thought, "That's an absurdly ambitious
project. It'll 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; they're more than halfway done.
They're sort of like the human genome: Once you have a big idea, it's just the big idea.
You can get to the big idea.
And finally, we, 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 at 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 prior repository 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'm a 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 is -- underpins
our global genome initiative.
So all this is to say that we're delighted with the partnership with NIH. Great thanks
to Eric Green and Vince Bonham, Francis Collins, 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.
[applause]
Eric Green: Thank you, Kirk, and I should point out a
couple things about the exhibition. First of all, this would not have -- Kirk mentioned
the fact that Life Technologies was generous to jump start the fundraising for this. This
exhibition would never have been possible had it not been for our great partnership
with the Foundation for NIH, who has 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 of you that 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, that -- 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 -- now a series of just
fabulous 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.