The Jackson Laboratory is an independent, non-profit biomedical research institution which was founded by Clarence Cook Little in 1929. It employs over 3,000 employees in Bar Harbor, Maine; Sacramento, California; Farmington, Connecticut; Shanghai, China; and Yokohama, Japan. The institution is a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center and has NIH Centers of Excellence in aging and systems genetics. According to the organization, its mission is "to discover the genetic basis for preventing, treating and curing human diseases, and to enable research and education for the global biomedical community."