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Dr. [Cristian] Samper, Dr. [Francis] Collins, Dr. [James] Watson, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

I am privileged to represent Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham as the steward of the Office of Science.

This gathering is as impressive as the event we celebrate today: the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of DNA’s structure and the completion of the Human Genome Project, a project that attracted some of the finest scientists and pioneers like Francis Collins and Craig Venter, who led the private sector effort to decode human DNA.

I am also pleased to recognize Dr. Ari Patrinos, who has played a pivotal role in the entire human genome project.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, providing 43 percent of government funding for this vital area of national importance.

The research the Office of Science supports in the physical sciences underpins advances in genomics and the life sciences.

No accomplishment by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science ranks higher than its historic role in the launching of the human genome program in 1986, as proposed by Charles DeLisi.

Today, our Joint Genome Institute brings together the research capabilities of three DOE national laboratories: Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos. The Joint Genome Institute’s state-of-the-art Production Genomics Facility in Walnut Creek now sequences two billion base pairs of DNA each month – the equivalent of two mammalian genomes each year.

Just as it pioneered the human genome project, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science is now spearheading systems biology, studying the behavior of the cell’s entire working complements of proteins, their regulatory pathways and their interactions as they perform function.

But these activities can only be carried out on a scale that far exceeds today’s capacities.

That is why the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, through the Genomes to Life program, is developing plans for a set of four new research facilities, intricately linked in their technologies, capabilities, and capacities:

• Facility One will be for the production and characterization of proteins. This facility will use highly automated processes to mass-produce and characterize proteins directly from microbial genome data and create “tags” to identify, capture, and monitor proteins from living systems – and to make them available to all researchers.

• Facility Two will be for whole proteome analysis, characterizing the expressed proteomes of diverse microbes under different environmental conditions – an essential step toward determining the functions and interactions of individual proteins and sets of proteins.

• Facility Three will characterize and image molecular machines, isolating, identifying, and characterizing thousands of microbes. It will develop the ability to image component proteins within complexes and validate the presence of these complexes within cells.

• Facility Four will analyze and model cellular systems, combining advanced computational, analytical, and experimental capabilities for the integrated observation, measurement, and analysis of variations in structure and functions of cellular systems – from individual microbial cells to complex communities and multi-cellular organisms.

Making the most advanced technologies and computing resources available to scientists in small or large laboratories will democratize access to the tools needed for systems biology. These facilities will open new avenues of inquiry and fundamentally change the course of biological research by greatly accelerating the pathways of discovery.

This is a day to celebrate both individual efforts and cooperative multidisciplinary research – the foundation of America’s scientific leadership.

Congratulations to all of you for your role in what is surely one of the most important accomplishments of mankind – the Human Genome Project. Thank you.