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The one thing Joseph Betz, PhD, wishes
people knew about his field is that it exists. Usually when he tells people
he’s a pharmacognosist, he gets blank looks and has to explain what that means.
“It would be kind of nice to not have to do that, to have people know what
pharmacognosy is,” he said. Betz, who describes himself as an “old-school, classical pharmacognosist,” has
dedicated his career to applied research (i.e., research meant to solve
problems). He has been a member of the American Botanical Council’s (ABC’s)
Advisory Board since ABC first established the board in 1996 and currently
serves as the director of the Dietary Supplement Analytical Methods and
Reference Materials (AMRM) program at the National Institutes of Health’s
(NIH’s) Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS). 
Established in 2002, the AMRM program aims to produce and make available resources,
such as validated analytical methods and reference materials, that can help researchers,
regulators, and companies verify the identities of dietary ingredients and
determine the amounts of constituents found in those ingredients. For example,
a validation study conducted by Paula Brown, PhD, and co-authored by Betz describes
applying a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method previously
developed by Brown and co-workers to detect and quantify the five major
phenolic compounds found in echinacea (Echinacea
spp., Asteraceae) raw materials and finished products, whereas the method had
previously been used only for raw materials.1
As director of the program, Betz provides intellectual guidance and financial
support for different research projects using established NIH funding
mechanisms. He also often helps write and edit the technical publications that result
from different projects. The research he oversees is done through contracts and
interagency agreements with other parts of the government, including the Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Pretty much every day is different,” Betz said. “There are times when I’m
doing bureaucracy type stuff, pushing papers around. But there are also times
when I’m sitting down and being a professional scientist, writing and editing
scientific publications and things like that.”
Betz said the AMRM program is “big and complicated,” so keeping all the
different parts moving forward occupies him full-time. “What I get to do, as
director of the program, is live vicariously,” he said. “Back in the day, I had
a career as a bench scientist, and I gave that up when I took this current
position. But, by interacting with the scientists who do the work and
participate in the program, I get to live vicariously and be active with a
whole lot of different science projects, instead of just the one or two that I
would’ve been working at if I were still at the [lab] bench.”
Before taking his current position at the ODS in 2002, Betz was a lab guy at
the FDA for 12 years. “Every once in a while you still get the itch where you
see something and you say, ‘I could fix that,’ and since you don’t have access
to a lab anymore, you can’t fix that,” he said. “You just have to find other
ways of getting it fixed.”
Betz doubts he will ever go back to the lab. “I have these pipe dreams, but
because it was so long ago and the technology changes so quickly, I’d be
completely ineffective if I went back to the lab,” he said.
The work now being done by the AMRM program is a “continuum” of the work Betz
did at the FDA, he said. “In the ’90s, when I was at FDA, I was inventing
methods, and then, when I went to NIH, I was allowing people to take methods
that they had invented and make sure that those methods work, and that was the
essence of the ODS program.”
Betz said the program is intended to give labs the tools to do good work. “I
think the original thrust of the program was towards methods development and
validation, but it turns out that a lot of companies and a lot of labs already
have methods, and so we’re starting to move towards giving them the tools to
prove that the methods they already have work the way they think they work, and
so that’s a bit of a shift, and that’s kind of exciting,” he said.
In 2005, Betz was named ABC’s first Norman R. Farnsworth Excellence in Botanical
Research Award recipient, largely because of the work he did at the FDA and
carried over to the NIH. The Farnsworth award honors the outstanding effort of
an individual or research group that has made a significant contribution to or
advancement of knowledge of medicinal plants or other natural products. In the
1990s, Betz worked on an adulteration problem in which a poisonous plant (Digitalis lanata, Scrophulariaceae) was
substituted for an edible plant (Plantago
spp., Plantaginaceae) in a dietary supplement. He and his FDA
colleagues did the detective work to figure out what happened. He also did work
involving ephedra (Ephedra sinica,
Ephedraceae) and yohimbe (Pausinystalia
johimbe, Rubiaceae) and work involving a contaminated dietary supplement containing
L-tryptophan that was associated with some adverse events. Because of this work
and other work, Betz was also later awarded the American Society of
Pharmacognosy’s Varro E. Tyler Prize for contributions to the field of
botanical dietary supplements.
Betz said he thinks his biggest contribution to the field has been helping
researchers, regulators, and industry stakeholders understand the importance of
reliable chemical and physical measurements. “In some cases it’s required by
regulations, but even in basic biomedical research, good measurements are
required to assure reproducibility of the research, so that we can build on existing
research and move into the future. Contemporary research results that rely on
measurements must stand the test of time, or knowledge does not advance,” Betz
said.
The analytical methods Betz has helped develop and validate are used by
manufacturers for the quality assurance of their products, but they can also be
used by regulators for enforcing label claims on products and by scientific
researchers who want to conduct pre-clinical and clinical trials.
Betz has always been interested in natural history and biology and started out
as a zoology major. “And then I discovered that there are poisonous plants and
animals out there, and so it’s not very far from poisonous plants to medicinal
plants. They’re often quite closely related,” he said. “My interests have always been public health related, whether they
involved poisonous plants or plants that have potential therapeutic use.”
He said the interdisciplinary training he received in botany, plant anatomy,
chemistry, and pharmacology is no longer widely available in a single degree
program in the United States because there is less demand for people with that
training. “Nowadays, researchers or students are looking to be able to do
advanced isolation and structure elucidation to discover new chemicals, new
compounds, new drugs. So, the old days of knowing something about the plant
itself, as well as about the effects of the plant, as well as about the
chemistry of the plant—that interdisciplinary training is kind of falling by
the wayside in the West.”
Betz, who earned his PhD in pharmacognosy at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy
and Science under Ara DerMarderosian, PhD, tries to educate people about his
discipline and encourage interest, but he hesitates to tell young people to
enter his field because the job market is limited. “When people ask if I’ve
loved my career, I tell them, ‘Yes, I’ve loved my career. I’ve loved everything
about it. I loved my training.’ But then you have to let them know that if they
choose to go this way, then their job prospects may be fairly limited,” he
said.
Betz is also an adjunct professor and reviews scientific journals. He has
authored or co-authored more than 85 peer-reviewed publications and book
chapters. He is a member of several organizations, including the American
Society of Pharmacognosy. In addition, he is a fellow of AOAC International,
which looks at the quality of chemical analytical methods.
Betz used to run marathons and play
baseball and softball. He was also the scoutmaster of his sons’ Boy Scout troop
and the coach of their soccer teams. Now, in his spare time, Betz enjoys reading,
both fiction and non-fiction. He loves history, especially military history. He
has been married to his wife, Jo Ann, for almost 40 years. They live in suburban
Maryland, and have two sons, Marshall and Curtis.
—Connor Yearsley
References -
Brown P, Chan M, Paley L,
Betz J. Determination of Major Phenolic Compounds in Echinacea spp. Raw
Materials and Finished Products by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography with
Ultraviolet Detection: Single-Laboratory Validation Matrix Extension. NIH
website. Available at: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586990/.
Accessed December 2, 2015.
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