Timeline Express Announcements – WARF

Partners in Discovery: The Construction of the Discovery Building in 2010

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:52:36 +0000

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 a community space called the Town Center...

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Riding the Wave of Biotechnology: The First Startup Equity Investment in 1994

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:49:50 +0000

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 James Dahlberg wanted the technology for a new company they had started themselves.

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A Professional Investment: WARF’s New Financial Strategy in 1983

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:48:06 +0000

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 endowment. The first trustees, several of whom had built successful careers...

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Protecting a Legacy, Building a Profession: The Institutional Patent Agreements of 1968 and 1973

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:46:19 +0000

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 might dry up altogether. From that point forward, Bremer set out on a 15-year...

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Fighting the Taxman: WARF Faces Off with the IRS in 1962

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:44:05 +0000

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 philanthropic foundation. Like any tax audit, the letter from Milwaukee came as a shock.

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Agreeing to Disagree: The End of the Steenbock Patent Debate in 1946

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:41:04 +0000

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 of food and drugs. That struggle included years of litigation and even a public accusation by...

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Get the Sunshine In: The Licensing of Irradiated Milk in 1932

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:40:34 +0000

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, in an opinion issued November 24, 1944, the foundation supported “research in...

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Of Rats and Men: Warfarin Becomes World Famous by 1955

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:39:51 +0000

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 their energy to the newer, lucrative patents of Steenbock’s colleague...

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Where the Truth Leads: The Hoard’s Dairyman Controversy

warf_admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 20:38:34 +0000

In late October 1925, one month before the legal incorporation of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, Alfred J. Glover, the influential editor of the trade magazine Hoard’s Dairyman, challenged the foundation’s right to exist.1 Earlier in 1925, Harry Steenbock had conceived the idea for WARF as a vehicle to license his vitamin D patents and use the royalties to support research at the...

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