Good morning. Welcome to the Ninth Women s Health and Environment Conference. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the president of the Heinz Family Philanthropies. Over the past nine conferences, we have come together to learn from each other and from the remarkable speakers who come with us. It s wonderful to see so many familiar faces here today and so many new ones as well. As some of you will recall, when we launched this conference in 1996, more than a few eyebrows were raised. People wondered, why was the focus solely on women? After all, the environment affects men s health too. But we did this for one simple reason. When women are informed, women act. As we've learned over the years from these conferences, to the extent that the scientific community has paid any attention to the relationship between human health and the environment, it has focused that attention far too often on men. Over the past number of years, we have covered some of the most complex and challenging topics facing women today. The theme of each conference is devised from the wide range of environmental factors that impact a woman's health. If you have not attended our conferences before, and would like to see copies of the previous conferences, please find me during the day (look for the bald guy) or any Heinz staffer that's here.

We have an impressive array of speakers today, people who will challenge each of us, the way we think, the way we live, and the way we act or not. Like everything that Teresa Heinz and the Heinz Foundations do, our goal is to confront the conventional wisdom and to encourage you to ask questions, and to keep on asking questions so that we can develop strong solutions.

Before I introduce our first speaker, let me cover a few housekeeping notes. First, for those of you with cellphones, please put them on vibrate or turn them off. Second, all the bathrooms in the facility except for the one bathroom designated for men, are all for women. And if you don t know where the men s room is, just find me.  The format, to remind those of you who have not been with us before, is interactive. This is not a conference where our speakers lecture you. This is a conference where you ask questions and challenge the speakers as well as each other. We will have staffers in the audience to help you submit questions to our speakers, and give you a microphone to ask your questions as well.

I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about the woman whose vision, generosity, and hard work has brought us together, my friend and my boss, Teresa Heinz.  As many of you know, for the past two years Teresa has had two full-time jobs: chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies and the Howard Heinz Endowment, as well as campaigning full-time for her husband John Kerry for president.  To understand the important work that the Heinz Philanthropies and the Heinz Endowments are doing, it is important to understand the woman whose vision spearheads the work we do. Many people will ask, who is Teresa Heinz, and I could say that she is extraordinary, passionate, very, very smart and caring, but that alone does not tell you enough. She is, more than anything else, a woman who uses her philanthropy as venture capital to help invest in ideas, strategies, programs and people to change the status quo. Teresa is someone who continues to change and challenge the political system as well, to challenge Republicans and Democrats to think more clearly and more openly about America's future.

But the one thing America got to see and understand as she campaigned across the country was a woman who listened carefully and intently to what voters said. And perhaps the one thing the press never told voters was that when Teresa spoke, she always spoke honestly and from the heart, [applause] qualities that Teresa teaches each of us every day. Whether it was a woman in West Virginia who had no health insurance, or a woman in Phoenix with breast cancer but couldn't afford the prescription drugs she needed, or a little girl in New Mexico who told us she simply didn't have enough food to eat, Teresa listened, she shared some ideas, sometimes some laughs, but hugged a heck of a lot of Americans. I've worked with Teresa now for almost 15 years. Every day is different. Every day is better than the one before. Please join me in welcoming my friend, Teresa Heinz.

 *Portions of the transcript were edited or shortened for readability.