2013 Presidential Address: Just another president's speech (but it's all about you).

First, I thank Mary-Claire for the wonderful introduction. As Mary-Claire noted, I moved here in 1967, when the Red Sox clinched the pennant for the first time after a long drought and then went on to play the St. Louis Cardinals, as they do again this year. I became a Red Sox fan in 1967 and survived the disappointments of 1975 and 1986, but eventually in 2004 they did win, and so I’m excited to now have the opportunity to be in Boston once again for a World Series. I also wanted to acknowledge that we are celebrating the 50 anniversary of Massachusetts’s becoming the first state to mandate phenylketonuria screening for newborns. This is one of the first and possibly themost impactful public-health successes that genetics has brought to us, and this milestone will resonate in talks we hear over the next few days as we increasingly see the application of genetic knowledge to directly benefit individuals. Today, I am going to focus in part on something that most of you might not feel is an exciting topic—a strategic plan for The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG).