WARF patent attorney finds retired bliss — at his old desk

Howard Bremer, a 78-year-old patent attorney, points to his forehead, where several lesions stain the skin. The lesions serve as an odd reminder of why he chose to be a patent attorney more than 50 years ago.

Working for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation since 1960, Bremer has helped bring the discoveries of UW–Madison researchers into the marketplace, where they can directly benefit people, even Bremer himself.

To treat the lesions on his face, Bremer uses a chemotherapy drug originally developed at the university in the 1950s. “It’s one of our own products,” Bremer says. “With all the gene-therapy work going on here, I want the researchers to hurry up. I might need whatever they’re working on later!”

Though Bremer left his full-time position at age 65, he promptly returned as a consultant for WARF, the nonprofit organization that protects the intellectual property of UW–Madison faculty.

“I can’t sit and fish silently,” he says. “Doing something constructive is what I like to do best.”

So instead of riding around on a golf cart, Bremer spends his retirement in his office at 614 Walnut St., where he keeps up on all the changes and debates in patent law so that WARF, he says, can better present its position. He also answers a lot of what he describes as “missionary calls” from colleagues in the patenting field who are looking for guidance.

Working after retirement, he says, is great. It squashed his wife’s worry about him being home all the time. “When I told my wife I was retiring, she said, “Half the salary and twice the husband!'” Furthermore, Bremer loves what he does.

As the first in-house patent attorney for WARF, Bremer would interview inventors about their developments, file patents based on those inventions and then try to license them to industry. “I was like a salesman,” he explains. With a background in chemical engineering — the field he studied as an undergraduate student at UW–Madison during World War II — Bremer handled most of the technologies relating to chemistry, biochemistry and chemical engineering with “excursions” into electronics and mechanical devices.

Before Bremer became a patent lawyer, he thought he wanted to be a chemical engineer. Eight months on a Navy destroyer, however, changed his mind. “It gave me time to think about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “And I wasn’t sure I wanted to do engineering-type work.”

So, in 1946 he enrolled in UW–Madison’s Law School under the GI Bill. “I thought it’d be a great profession,” he says. After a short course taught by a Milwaukee patent attorney, Bremer says he knew he wanted to go into patent law.

Throughout his career at WARF, Bremer has been instrumental in passing new patent laws and overturning old ones. “Until 1980, absent special arrangements with certain government agencies, any invention that was funded with federal dollars — even just a buck — belonged to the government,” he says. Generally, that government ownership meant that faculty and their institutions received no royalties and that the public seldom benefited from the invention because licensing the technology to industry was difficult.

But after 20 years of persistent arguing by a group of university technology transfer representatives led by Bremer, the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act was passed. It permitted universities, not the government, to retain the ownership of patents developed by their researchers.

Bremer says the Bayh-Dole Act, along with a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court the same year that allowed the patenting of living organisms, really opened up the field of technology transfer, which has brought more inventions into the commercial realm where they can directly benefit people. “Industry was much more readily interested in dealing with universities when they owned the patents,” he says.

Industry’s interest in developing faculty inventions, as a result of the Bayh-Dole Act, turned the field of patenting and licensing into a profession. A measurement of this growth, says Bremer, is the increase in membership to the Association of University Technology Managers, a professional organization for people who manage intellectual property.

One year before the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, AUTM had just more than 100 members; today, it has more than 2,500. To further encourage the development of the profession, the group recently established the Howard Bremer Scholarships, which are awarded to newer members.

Bremer has filed hundreds of patents, in the United States and overseas. Though the patents last only 20 years (after which time they become, in a sense, public property), Bremer says their effects reach far into the future. In recalling one WARF patent that led to the development of the popular blood-thinning drug Coumadin, Bremer explains, “All the inventors are dead, all the royalties have ceased to flow, but the invention continues to save lives.”

Because Bremer can watch the science developed in the lab evolve into products that can benefit people, he says he has “one of the best jobs in the world. The science is fascinating and on the cutting edge, and seeing the inventors’ research being born into the marketplace is very gratifying.”

Perhaps that’s why, even after retirement, he still comes to work every day.