Prominent WARF patent expert wins prestigious national award

Patent lawyer Howard Bremer, a pioneer in university-based technology transfer, is the 2006 winner of the Jefferson Award, an annual recognition of outstanding contributors to intellectual property law in the United States.

Bremer, a patent attorney with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) who has been called the “father of university licensing,” will receive the Jefferson medal today (June 2) during a ceremony at the New Jersey Intellectual Property Association’s headquarters in Short Hills, N.J.

“[This award] is kind of a culmination of a lot of years of work in the intellectual property field,” Bremer says. “The recognition by the peer group is to me very important and gratifying.” Where most previous recipients of the Jefferson Award have been judges or other members of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Bremer comes directly out of the university sector. “It’s great company to join,” he says.

The award is considered “a very significant honor” in the national intellectual property community, says Allen Kipnes, former New Jersey Intellectual Property Law Association president.

Bremer has wielded tremendous influence in the area of technology transfer between universities and private companies. As a patent attorney for WARF, and founder and president of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), he helped champion the landmark Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, among other accomplishments.

Before 1980, the government owned the patent rights to any invention that was developed with federal funding. At the time, “[the government’s] ability to transfer technology for public benefit was abysmal,” says Bremer. “Less than 5 percent was ever transferred.”

Bayh-Dole, however, gave universities and nonprofit organizations the right to hold the patents on their own inventions. The involvement of inventors in marketing their own technologies helped to dramatically increase the number of inventions licensed by companies, according to Bremer. Today, up to 30 percent of new university technologies are routinely licensed for the marketplace.

The Economist magazine called Bayh-Dole “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted over the past half-century.” Bremer himself described the act as “recognition by Congress that imagination and creativity are truly a national resource.”

One of the factors leading up to Bayh-Dole was institutional patent agreements between the University of Wisconsin–Madison and several government agencies, which gave the university control of discoveries funded by those agencies. Bremer was the “principal driver” in achieving these agreements, according to Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of WARF.

“It really set the model for how technology that came out of federally funded research could be commercialized,” Gulbrandsen says. “A lot of the language that is in those two agreements, which Howard was principal in negotiating, was actually just lifted right into the federal law.”

Bremer also helped WARF break into the international scene. He wrote the patents for UW–Madison researcher Hector DeLuca’s vitamin D derivatives, and then went to Japan to market them. “This was the first big venture by WARF in the international arena. It demonstrated that you didn’t have to deal only with an American company,” Gulbrandsen says.

More recently, Bremer played an important role in bringing about the Cooperative Research and Technology Enhancement act of 2004, which serves to make technology transfer easier in cases where research is conducted cooperatively by more than one organization.

“[AUTM] holds Howard and his continuing contributions in such high regard that it has created the Bremer Scholarship in his honor,” says John Fraser, AUTM’s current president. “He continues to influence current events and provide inspiration for the younger generation.”

A Wisconsin native, Bremer was born in Milwaukee in 1923 and earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at UW–Madison. After two years in the Navy, he attended the UW–Madison Law School, earning his degree in 1949. Bremer then worked for Procter & Gamble as the company’s first patent attorney before joining WARF in 1960.

Now a patent counsel emeritus, Bremer is still integral to WARF. “He’s worked at WARF for 40 years. He retired in 1987 but has been working full-time ever since,” says Gulbrandsen. “Howard’s our anchor. He really is a giant in this industry. He sets a good example for everybody.”