No place on campus encapsulates WARF’s history over the last decade quite like the Discovery Building. Occupying a full city block on University Avenue, Discovery houses three complementary entities: the private, nonprofit Morgridge Institute for Research, supported by WARF; the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID), managed by the university; and……
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Riding the Wave of Biotechnology: The First Startup Equity Investment in 1994
In 1993, Dick Leazer overheard a heated conversation outside his office in the WARF building. Two members of the foundation’s licensing team were locked in a debate over how to handle a request from two UW-Madison professors. Instead of licensing their WARF patents to an established firm, Lloyd Smith and……
A Professional Investment: WARF’s New Financial Strategy in 1983
Over the first 50 years of its history, WARF gained international attention for its groundbreaking inventions and lucrative patents. Meanwhile, most of the foundation’s growth came not from innovative science but from financial investments as the trustees spent much of their time buying and selling stocks to grow the WARF……
Protecting a Legacy, Building a Profession: The Institutional Patent Agreements of 1968 and 1973
Sometime around 1964, Managing Director Ward Ross told WARF Patent Counsel Howard Bremer that the foundation’s licensing team, including Bremer himself, might soon be out of a job. Over the prior two years, patentable inventions on campus had slowed to a trickle. If the trend continued, WARF’s patenting and licensing……
Fighting the Taxman: WARF Faces Off with the IRS in 1962
On November 27, 1962, the Milwaukee District Office of the Internal Revenue Service sent a letter threatening to revoke WARF’s tax-exempt status. If Washington, D.C., confirmed the district’s recommendation, it would mean more than a new tax bill. An adverse ruling might mark the end of WARF’s existence as a……
Agreeing to Disagree: The End of the Steenbock Patent Debate in 1946
Last month’s installment of Decade by Decade recounted how a federal court in 1944 ruled Harry Steenbock’s patents were invalid.1 The decision made little sense in terms of the actual science of vitamin D and can only be understood within the context of a larger political struggle over federal regulation……
Get the Sunshine In: The Licensing of Irradiated Milk in 1932
The previous installment of Decade by Decade told the story of an influential booster in 1925 who worried that Harry Steenbock’s vitamin D patents would undermine Wisconsin’s dairy industry.1 By the 1940s, controversy would come from the opposite direction. According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,……
Of Rats and Men: Warfarin Becomes World Famous by 1955
While the era of the Steenbock patents came to a close when WARF dedicated them to the public in 1946,1 Harry Steenbock remained engaged with the foundation into the 1950s, monitoring the actions of the trustees and offering them advice. Meanwhile, a younger generation of foundation management dedicated most of……