Eric Green: Well, good morning, everyone.
Welcome.
I'm Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and I'd like to
welcome all of you to the third pair of speakers that we have as part of a celebratory period
of time commemorating the 10th anniversary of the completion of the Human Genome Project.
By way of reminder, we have a number of events this spring, including these paired lectures.
You are at the middle of three.
But I also want to put a plug in for our April 25 all-day symposium at Natcher Auditorium.
We hope you'll join us there as well.
And if you can't make any of these, or you have colleagues who wish they could've seen
it or would've been here, including the symposium and all the lectures, these are all being
videotaped and will be video-archived on GenomeTV Channel, a YouTube associated with our institute,
and will be up for forever for you to view.
As hopefully some of you came to our first set of paired lectures, we decided to do something
a little different for these: to gather individuals that we thought would be interesting to hear
as a -- as a pair; also to stimulate discussion around important areas of genomics.
And I think you will quickly find out that the pair of speakers we selected today have
certainly fit the bill of both being experts in their areas, but also addressing topics
that are of great interest, and certainly the one today is.
And the format is going to be, we're going to have both speakers give their presentations,
but we've built this in with a considerable amount of time to have a question-and-answer
and hopefully discussion at the end.
And we will save all the discussion, the questions, after both speakers have given their presentations.
So let me do the introductions of both, and then I'm going to turn this over to -- so
you can hear the speakers.
So the first speaker you're going to hear from is Dr. Isaac, or Zak, Kohane, who is
the director of Children's Hospital Boston Informatics Program.
At Harvard Medical School, he's the Henderson Professor of Pediatrics and Health Sciences
and Technology.
He's also the co-director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics and director of the
Countway Library of Medicine.
Now, Zak leads multiple collaborations in the use of genomics and computer science to
study cancer and the development of the brain, with a particular emphasis on autism.
He has developed several computer systems to allow multiple hospital systems to be used
as a living laboratory, if you will, to study the genetic basis of disease while preserving
patient privacy.
Zak received his medical degree from Boston University School of Medicine.
He then completed an internship, residency, and fellowship at Children's Hospital Boston.
His current research builds on his doctoral work in computer science on decision support
and subsequent research in machine learning applied to biomedicine.
He has led the development of new health identification systems, automated personal health records,
and peer-to-peer pathology informatics networks.
Zak leads several NIH-funded efforts to translate genomic research into clinical practice, and
continues his own practice in pediatric endocrinology in Boston.
And finally, Zak is a founder of the Center for Outcomes and Policy Research at the Dana-Farber
Cancer Institute, and founder and associate director for the Center for Genetic Epidemiology
at Harvard Medical School.
After Zak has given his presentation, the second speaker will be Dr. George Church.
George is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, and for many years, George
has been a pioneering contributor to the field of genomics, particularly in the development
of technologies for performing genome analysis and particularly DNA sequencing.
In addition, he's a highly regarded for being an outstanding mentor to many talented trainees
who themselves have become important contributors to the field of genomics.
George earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1984, and his early work included developing the
first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing, and barcoding.
These techniques led to generating one of the first genome sequences for the pathogen,
the Helicobacter pylori, in 1994.
His work, then, in developing next-generation genome sequencing, and also synthesis and
cell and tissue engineering, has resulted in 12 companies spanning fields including
medical genomics and synthetic biology.
George is also the director of PersonalGenomes.org, providing open-access information on human
genomic, environmental, and trait data.
He's also director of an NHGRI Center for Excellence in Genomic Science.
Among his many honors, and there are many honors, he was elected to the National Academy
of Sciences and also the National Academy of Engineering.
And one other honor that came about recently: He was awarded the Franklin Institute Bower
Award for Achievement in Science.
So we have two very distinguished speakers talking about a very important topic, and
the general area we're going to be discussing today is genomic data privacy and risk.
So we'll start off with Zak.
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