He received his bachelor"s in 1953 and master"s in 1955 in pharmacy at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, and his Doctor of Philosophy in Pharmacognosy from the University of Pittsburgh in 1959, where he helped establish the Pharmacognosy Department and became its first chairman
An army veteran of the Korean War, Farnsworth served as a Private First Class and eventually as a Corporal in the Third Infantry Division, Seventh Regimental Combat Team, nicknamed the "Fire Brigade" in of Korea. He was seriously wounded in the winter of 1950. He was also awarded four oak leaf clusters, representative of four additional awards of the Bronze Star medal, the Combat Medical Badge, and the Korean Ribbon with Four Battle Stars.
He was also the founding director of the Program for Collaborative Research in the Pharmaceutical Sciences at University of Illinois at Chicago.
From 1970 to 1982, he was the head of the Department of Pharmacognosy and Pharmacology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 1974, he traveled to China with the American Herbal Pharmacology Delegation, where they studied the practice of traditional Chinese herbal medicine.
Afterwards, the National Academy of Sciences published "Herbal Pharmacology in the People's Republic of China."
When computers were first coming onto the scene, Farnsworth created Natural Products Alert (NAPRALERT) in 1975. The NAPRALERT database was the first computerized collection on the research and science of natural products.
He was also the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Traditional Medicine Programme at International Union of Railways (UIC, French: Union Internationale des Chemins de fer)’s College of Pharmacy.
He also received three honorary doctorates from University of Paris V (René Descartes), Upsalla University in Sweden, and his alma mater, the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Allied Sciences.
He was a founding member of the American Society of Pharmacognosy in 1959. Farnsworth was a member of the World Health Organization (World Health Organization) Expert Advisory Panel on Traditional Medicine. A pioneer in the field of pharmacognosy, Doctor Farnsworth was an honorary member of the American Society of Pharmacognosy, an honorary member of the Society for Economic botany, an honorary member of the International Society of Ethnopharmacology, an honorary member of the French Pharmacognosy Society, and a member of the Japanese Society of Pharmacognosy.
