I didn't start out as a nutritionist; I started out as a human geneticist and I was
interested in inborn errors in metabolism.
So my initial education and postdoctoral training was in human genetics.
I spent maybe 20 years after that at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia where I
studied inborn errors of lipid metabolism.
That was before I came to the NIH and I've been at the NIH since '93.
It's interesting; everybody has a story to tell.
And my story is that I was a long-time bench scientist at Children's in Philadelphia, and
it was a transition, and it was a fairly simple one.
Funding started to become very, very challenging.
So I took the opportunity to come to the NIH, initially on a sabbatical just because I
wanted to find out what it was like on the other side.
You know the difference between academic science and the government agencies that fund
them; the problem is if you're a funded scientist out in the field, you don't know
anything about how the government really works.
So I figured I'd take this opportunity --- it was a good period in my career to do
something like this --- to come to the NIH, learn what it was like from the government
side, and then I expected to go back to an academic position.
Sure enough, 21 years later I'm still here, so that was a major transition for me but it
turned out to be quite a terrific opportunity.
So that involves even more transitions.
I came to the NIH initially to run diabetes programs in the National Institute of
Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
So I was a program administrator for three years and the opportunity came up to join the
Division of Nutrition Research Coordination as its Deputy Director in about '96.
And I took that opportunity; that was really my first full-time honest, straight-up
exposure to nutrition, although arguably my academic and research career beforehand
prepared me for a nutrition kind-of environment.
So that was one transition.
That's how I got to nutrition in the first place.
But the other thing that happened was that I stopped really being focused on research and
then became much more focused on the translation of research into policy, and there began
my interest in nutrition, policy in the United States; I became involved in Dietary
Reference Intakes activities, Dietary Guidelines activities, and that led to my being one
of co-organizers of the National Nutrition Summit in 2000 here in Washington.
As I alluded to in my earlier remarks, this is not a position for which I felt I had
uniquely trained myself; a lab geneticist and then becoming the
Director of the Office of Dietary Supplements.
I think it was the lab training; the fact that I have an understanding of how science
works and maybe, at least as importantly, I don't have a dog in the race.
You probably know that the field of dietary supplements is pretty charged.
Everybody has an opinion about dietary supplements and
those opinions range very, very broadly.
Well, having somebody as the director of the science office that has the most influence
over dietary supplement research, it's probably just as well to have somebody who doesn't
represent a particular point of view, whether it's very positive, advocacy kind of
position, or a very skeptical, negative position.
Keep an open mind about it and allow people to be able to have their say and to help me
to decide what the directions are.
It was an opportunity that while I had not necessarily prepared myself for, it's an
opportunity that turned out to be enormously gratifying.
I'm Canadian, so my early education and Ph.D. training were in Canada.
I did postdoctoral training in England; that was a transition.
Probably the biggest sort of personal transition was moving to the United States in the
first place, and that was in 1974.
Obviously I've enjoyed it and thrived, because I and my family have been here ever since.
But that was a personal transition that needed to be made.
Academic transitions, well that's part of the game.
I think in my case, the unique thing is that I had a long career in academic science
before I came to the government.
So I've spent just about as much time in the government as I did in academia.
But that was a big transition.
I would say that moving into nutrition, eventually;
I finally saw the light is probably what happened.
And I moved to nutrition and it was certainly a transition for me.
Dietary supplements in my view are a subset of nutrition, but what in the career of a
card-carrying geneticist would've prepared them for a career as the
Director of the Office of Dietary Supplements?
Not a lot.
But it's been a fascinating learning experience all along the way.
This is a unique opportunity, being the director of an organization like this.
We have the chance to be able to influence not just research but also to use the
opportunity to translate that research into policy.
So, in my position as Director of this office, I've been very fortunate to have
exceptional people working with me and to have a budget that grew quite nicely for a
while, I must say it's now been very flat for a while.
I'm not complaining about that, but I had the opportunity to grow things and in this
field there were considerable opportunities for influencing research.
In a nutshell, the needs were great and I could help to fill some of the gaps in
knowledge about dietary supplements.
And of course it's the ingredients in dietary supplements; micronutrients, bioactive
components that are derived from foods and herbs and so-on.
We share a lot with the food-oriented people and with the herb-oriented people.
All of whom are represented in this field of dietary supplements.
So how do we do our work?
A major part of it is working with others at the NIH to fund grants in this field.
So about half of our budget is spent on co-funding grants in the field of dietary
supplements with others at the NIH.
And that accounts for about 100 grants a year for us.
It's a relatively small investment but in a field like this it's very important to have
that kind of investment, the federal investment in research.
The other thing that we do that I think has helped the field a lot is that we've
developed resources that can be used by a broad array of people in the field from
academic scientists to industry people, to other government agencies including the
regulatory agencies in order to do their work.
And simply put, we've developed a program called Analytical Methods and Reference
Materials, the goal of which is to help provide tools for analytical scientists in all of
those settings that I mentioned earlier.
And to provide tools that at the end of the day will help consumers feel much more
confident that the products that they have in the marketplace are of high quality and
contain what they say they contain.
So that's one.
Another is we've provided databases that can be used by scientists and others in our
stakeholder community to conduct their work; databases of dietary supplement labels and
of dietary supplement ingredients.
We also provide access to research findings in dietary supplements through a database
that we call CARDS.
Other things that we do that we think can help the community more broadly is we work very
closely with the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
We support the measurement of biomarkers of nutrition status and we also support the
collection of data about nutrient intake from foods and dietary supplements.
And those together help a broader community of people because we can fund them and it
makes it available for others to use.
And I guess the last tool that we provide for people in the field of nutrition science is
opportunities for training and for education.
And then finally, all of this is intended to inform a very needy consumer public.
A lot of dietary supplements are available in the U.S.
marketplace, and a lot of information is available about them too; all over the place.
How much of it is reliable is in the eye of the beholder.
What we like to try to do is provide reliable, straight-up authoritative kinds of
information about dietary supplements and their ingredients for consumers to be able to
use when they're making decisions about what they're going to do.
I was made a Fellow of the American Society for Nutrition last year and
that was a huge honor.
I was awarded the Conrad Elvehjem prize for public service in nutrition a few years ago.
And that one was particularly touching because I think it's important to recognize the
value that nutrition science in the government, the value that it has
for the broader community.
So I took this as a recognition on behalf of a lot of nutrition scientists in the government.
I'm on the Board of the American Society for Nutrition for a couple of years and I think
that's a terrific opportunity to be able to see things in action but also to try to shape
future activities in nutrition.
So I'm quite proud of those and I think they're lots of fun too.
This is a big question and I've given it a lot of thought from my perspective as a
funder of nutrition science.
I'm increasingly persuaded that we have to use interdisciplinary, collaborative
approaches to solve the most vexing problems in nutrition.
Part of the reason for that is that they're not uni-dimensional.
So while I praise scientists in their laboratories everywhere, at the end of the day I'm
thinking that some of the next steps are going to have to be made by fostering
collaboration among scientists, especially scientists of different stripes, different
backgrounds, difference experiences with different talents to be able to bear on the
broad topics that we confront with nutrition these days.
Transition can be a big part of a career, and sometimes you
don't know when that's going to happen.
And all it takes is maybe just a little veering to the left, and suddenly you're facing a
whole new array of opportunities.
And then another little step to the left, and you're facing
yet another array of possibilities.
And I have learned, sometimes it's been a challenge, but I've learned that those kinds of
transitions can provide real opportunities for you to be able to influence a field, as I
hope I've done, but particularly to get satisfaction and I know I've gotten that from
being open to change and sometimes being a little afraid of it, but being open to the
opportunities that it provides.