Good evening. I
am pleased to welcome you all to the Woodrow Wilson Center for today's
discussion and debate on "Who Owns the Genome?" I would also like to
welcome our "virtual" viewers who are joining us over the Internet for the
live webcast of this event. Today's event is co-sponsored by the Wilson
Center and Affymetrix Corporation.
I would like to thank those people here at the Wilson Center, and at
Affymetrix, who over the past five months turned an idea into today's
event.
We are
pleased to co-sponsor this event with Affymetrix, a firm that is both a
leading developer of new genetic technologies and an advocate of broader
public education about the challenges facing us in the genetic age.
As many of you know, the Woodrow Wilson Center was created to bridge the
worlds of scholarship and policymaking. Part of our mission at the Center
is to address future long-term challenges to our society and government,
and we have set up a new project on Foresight and Governance with this
specific goal in mind.
Few areas will have a more profound impact on our society than genetics.
Future historians, perhaps some of them writing here at the Wilson Center,
will refer to the sequencing of the human genome as one of the great
scientific accomplishments of humankind.
But the application of this knowledge will be just as stunning and
profoundly challenging to public policy. How we prepare both the public
and our policymakers to deal with the flood of
new genetic knowledge and
its applications will be critical to our ability to harvest its benefits
in this new world coming.
Last November, the Director of the National Science Foundation, Dr. Rita
Colwell, said in this room: "We need to develop a broader, more
anticipatory perspective in our research. We need to increase our emphasis
on envisioning future possibilities, good or ill, as a mechanism to
predict."
The rewards of new scientific knowledge will flow to those persons,
organizations and nations that put a premium on anticipating and shaping
the future, rather than simply reacting to it. But anticipation is not an
easy task, and the science of genetics will challenge us in many ways.
Thus, we need a much more vigorous and open debate on both the science and
its implications.
Woodrow Wilson once said: "I use all the brains that I have - and all
those that I can borrow." You can help us to better understand the present
and prepare us for a future that will certainly hold many surprises, and
present many challenges.
We are joined this evening by a stellar group of panelists, whom you will
have the pleasure of meeting in a moment. It is now my pleasure to
introduce Dr. Stephen Foder, the founder, Chairman, and CEO of Affymetrix.