And actually, I'm curious, from your six months now at Illumina, has your definition of impact or what need or impact drives your work, has that evolved by your current experience? Or do you think it's still largely what it was a year ago?

There's a couple of thoughts I have in thinking about that because, you know, I will tell you that on an hour by hour basis, you know, the majority of the time I feel like I'm doing a job incredibly similar, you know, being an NHGRI director or being the Illumina CEA chief medical officer.

It is really about constantly trying to figure out what are the barriers, what are the obstacles that are preventing us from taking full advantage of the opportunities to bring genomics into medicine.

That is my laser focus.

You know, there's differences on how I operationalize that.

But most of the time, thinking about those things are fundamentally the same.

I think the things that have shifted a little bit since I've gotten to Illumina is I've gotten, I would say, twofold.

So if we think about now where the costs have plummeted on the sequencing aspect, you as chief medical officer, where is your sights set on where, say, for example, Illumina's strategy should go in the future to keep up the metabolism that it's built up over the years?

They said they went about 15 minutes into it, and yeah, they said, okay, we're done.

So, you know, driving from Santa Fe to Espanola, the fire's just up there on the right on the mountain.

And, you know, at night when the air cools and settles, all that smoke that has risen or is even up there on top of the mountain goes right down into the valley.

Some of it spills on over towards that Cochiti side of the valley, too, and spits out down through Albuquerque from the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristos.

There's just general cold air draining from those mountain ranges, basically from Espanola, Santa Fe, all the way down through Albuquerque to Socorro every morning.

So the smoke that we see in Albuquerque is from that fire, and we're probably going to see it again tomorrow.

Maybe in for a wind direction change and a flow change by Thursday morning, but tomorrow's probably going to be just like this morning.

So is it getting better? I mean, are we going to finally get back to that pattern again?

was going to ask you, so actually this El Nino will affect our snowfall in the mountains, hopefully?

Likely.

It is really expected to kind of max out by the end of the calendar year and still definitely be in place through the winter season next year.

And then as far as, you know, late winter, spring, there's a bit more uncertainty as to how that's going to play out.

But for the rest of 2026, And in the very early 2027, this is likely going to be the forecast signal.

And, you know, this is – while for the desert southwest here, it's typically, you know, cooler than average and wetter, there are some very important parts of the world and also the country where this is a bad thing.

You know, where I'm from in Minnesota in the upper Midwest, kind of the nation's breadbasket, it's typically a drier weather scenario.

I mean, could this El Nino actually help us a lot?

Um, what, what, what do you think of when it comes to cancer?

Well, y- y- you know, you give another, you give a great example.

I just wanna really point out for those of, of, of your listeners, um, who aren't as familiar with what's going on in cancer, it is, it's really important to, to appreciate.

I mean, cancer is a disease of the genome.

We always knew that was the case.

In fact, you know, there, there was that famous editorial, um, by, um, Dalbeka, the very famous cancer biologist, um, who, uh, wrote a perspective, uh, about four years before the Human Genome Project, uh, started, and it was, uh, I think it was published in Science.

I mean, he basically said, "If we're ever gonna understand cancer, we must sequence the human genome." And we always knew that, that one of the lead clinical areas in genomics, uh, as it, as it reached medicine was gonna be cancer.

Um, I'm thinking Tempus that brings all that together and can deliver that when you do a genetic test.

The project's version of the moon landing happened in April 2003, with the first nearly complete sequence declared finished.

When the Genome Project ended, our institute pivoted to begin to use genomics as part of medicine, basically using genomic information about individual patients to improve their medical management.

Uh, genomics has just infused its way into all areas of life sciences.

I mean, everything from agriculture, to ecology, to evolutionary studies.

And, you know, 22 years ago, there was minimal that we could do in terms of getting insights about a patient's DNA, and now it's routine, whether it's prenatal screening to look for chromosomal and DNA abnormalities in unborn children, or in cancer, which is a disease of the genome.

The way we deal with cancer now is completely different because of genomics, or with rare genetic diseases.

And I just wanna stress that it's just the earliest days.

A Health and Human Services official told The Atlantic that, quote, "Under a new administration, we have the right to remove individuals who do not align with the agency's priorities."