overview

Overview of the conference

Nancy J. Kelley

agenda: http://engineeringbiologycenter.org/2017-agenda/

meeting website: http://engineeringbiologycenter.org/may-2017-meeting/

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/gp-write-a-grand-challenge-tickets-31585071800

wifi: NYGC-Guest / welcome101 username: nygcguest

Let's get started. I wanted to thakn you for being a part of this. Our new partner Labcyte.. understands the value of this project as well as our other sponsors who have worked with me for years in developin life sciences in NY city. Today after so much effort to launch a grand challenge advancing engineering bilogy, I am thrilled to anounce that we are obversubscribed at this meeti with nearly 250 attendees from 10 countries. Thank you all so much for coming and showing your support. This is really exciting.

The participants in this meeting are academic scientists, ethicists, lawyers, educators, citizen scientists, artists, policy makers, tech geeks and laypeople who are all excited to learn about this project. By way of analoy, NY geome center is a institution that I started about y7 years ago. We started this institution because we believed that a large-scale sequencing facility in NY could advance the cause of human health. When we started, I had a cell phone and a hotmail account. Since then, the idea we began with has been transformed into one of the most important high-throughput sequencing facilities in NY and beyond, with many scientists working on important problems, like autism and cancer and many others.

To those of you that doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world and the way it works, I say wait and we'll show you. This project changes ont only the way the world works, but it will change the way we work in the world. When my work at NY genome center was done, the Sloan Foundation invited me to explore the future of engineering biology. I had no idea what this was about. Over the past 4 years, I came to understand the power of the technologies being created in this field and the promise they hold for our world in many ways.

How do we feed, fuel and heal the world? For the next 2 days, we have the privilege to explore the concrete steps that the porject ca ntake, to solve some of the mos timportant problems of our lifetime. How to understand biological processes? How do we move from carbon economy to biology economy that is sustainable? How to further advance cures for disease? And just as importantly, how to communicae this responsibly to the world. Since last year's meeting, hgp-write leadership meeting has been hard at work responding to comments from the public. The project name has been changed from hgp-write to GP-write and the scope has been expanded. The project will focus on synthesis and genome editing technologies to understand, engineer and test organisms, including plants and human cell lines. Our goal is not to just deepen understanding of life, but also to develop practical technologies for DNA synthesis, DNA assembly in cells, and testing DNA variations on tissue characterization.

The agenda is focused on this. The first day is about science, an overview of the expanded focus of the project, closed by the ethical, social and legal implications. There's an exploration of new pilot projects, a look at the scientific roadmap for the project, and ending the day with new pitches for pilot prjects. O the second day, we focus on technology and infrastructure, we close the day with ideas for roadmaps and related ideas that will be coordinated by working groups.

Just a few reminders in terms of logistics. We are livestreaming the first session of this sessio nand videotaping the rest of the sessions. If you have not signed a waiver, we ask you to do that at the registration desk. We have a lot of people here today, alost to capacity of what this facility will hold. It's a tight space. Some people will be participating in the cafe, so we ask speakers to remind themselves to ask for questions from the cafe at the end of their talks as ewll.

We have a tight aenda jam-packed with great talks. But that meanz we need to ask the speakers to sit in the front of the room and be ready with their presentations and load them on the second laptop before the speaker finishes. Some of these presentations will include unpublished scientific data and we hope that you will not share it on social media. You do have a one-pager in your bag, this is it, it explains how to participate in the social dialog in this meeting and how to sign on to the meeting app to take part on polling questions that we will be running today.

Thank you for helping us to usher in a new era of great scientific growth and advvancement.