University Place

Steenbock and the Patenting of University Science

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Night at the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen, I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension here at UW-Madison, formerly known as the Cooperative Extension folks here in Wisconsin. And on behalf of those folks and our other core organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the U.W. Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Night at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it’s my great pleasure to welcome to Wednesday Night at the Lab, Kevin Walters. He was born in Columbia, Missouri. And he graduated from high school from Temple High School in Temple, Texas. Then he went to the University of Texas at Austin for undergraduate degrees in both history and in humanities. Then he got two master’s degrees at the University of Texas at Dallas. Again one in humanities and one in history. Then he came to UW-Madison, and he just finished up his PhD in history here at UW-Madison. He defended in 2018, but he’s going to walk in 2019.
(laughter)
And as I always say, how do you pronounce party?
(laughter)
He’s here to talk about a pretty amazing thing. The title of this talk is “Before the Foundation: “Harry Steenbock and the Patenting of University Science, “1886-1925.”

As someone famous from my hometown, Ronald Reagan used to say, “It’s not that people don’t know. “It’s just so much what we know just isn’t so.” And I think we’re going to have some pretty interesting myth-busting today, and one of the most fascinating things about education isn’t just learning, it’s unlearning. I got to hear your talk a couple of weeks ago. There’s going to be a lot of unlearning tonight. Please join me in welcoming Kevin Walters to Wednesday Night at the Lab.
(applause)
– Thank you.

The first myth I have to bust actually is I already walked in 2018. The degree will be granted in 2019 for bureaucratic reasons. I didn’t want anybody to get their hopes up that you were going to be invited to the party ’cause it already happened.
(laughter)
I deposited on Martin Luther King Day actually, so the degree will be granted in 2019, but anyway. We’re historians. We have to get our dates right. My title is a Strategic Research Coordinator at WARF. I’ve worked at WARF in various capacities since 2011. Strategic Research Coordinator is the corporate-sounding title for the historian. We had to make it sound respectable somehow, but my job is basically historian. And I like to start any talk I give about WARF by asking people how many of you have heard of WARF. There it is. How many of you actually know what WARF does?
(light laughter)
Okay, yeah. Also, this is probably the fourth time I’ve presented in this room for different reasons. How many people have heard me talk before? Okay, a few. I’m guessing I’m getting to the point of getting repeat customers, which is always a good thing, but I try to mix up my jokes a little bit. How many of you have heard of Harry Steenbock, who is actually the subject? Okay, so about the same number. How many know what Harry Steenbock actually did? Okay, that’s good. I’m glad. Thanks for being honest. When I talk about WARF, I start with a story that I was once at the Discovery Building across the street here, and a woman, who I believe she worked at the Chamber of Commerce, asked me where I worked. And I said I work at WARF. And she said, “Oh, the wharf? Where’s that?” And I said there’s this building we’ve got down by the lake. And great views of the lake, and we had a confusing conversation that went on longer than it should have, and eventually she just said, “Wait a minute, there’s a wharf on Lake Mendota?”
(light laughter)
So I have to clarify. There’s Warf with an A, not with the H. She seemed to think I was slinging fish down on the lake, but it’s not the truth. What WARF actually is is what we call a technology transfer office. Most universities have them these days. What we do is we take discoveries that have been made in the university laboratories. We file patents on the patentable items that come out of those discoveries. We license them to companies, sometimes existing companies, other times they’re start-ups that faculty have founded themselves. We take the proceeds, the royalties that WARF earns off of the products that are developed by those companies. We put that money into an endowment. That endowment then funds annual grants back to the university to support research. We call this a cycle of innovation, which starts at the university, goes out to the public marketplace and it comes back to the university to support future research, so the cycle can continue. A couple things to clarify about WARF. It is not an office on Bascom Hall, in Bascom Hill.

It’s a separate nonprofit foundation in that building that I just showed you there. It’s run by an independent board of UW-alumni. In order to be a member of the board of WARF, you either have to be the managing director, the chancellor at the university, or have gotten a degree from UW-Madison. And it’s also, we only support UW-Madison. We do not support the UW System. The University of Milwaukee Research Foundation handles Milwaukee patents, and WiSys Technology Foundation handles the rest of the system. They’re our sister foundation, so we only support UW-Madison. And we don’t support things like Marquette. We don’t support other businesses or other foundations. Just UW-Madison local office. So there’s a couple things that gives you kind of the basic overview of what WARF is and what WARF does. I also want to give you some details about Harry Steenbock. He is the subject of my talk and the subject of the dissertation that I just completed, so that we’ll all be on the same page. WARF was Harry Steenbock’s idea, basically. He was born in Wisconsin, raised in Wisconsin, and his degree dates there. He attended, got three degrees from the University of Wisconsin. It was just the University of Wisconsin at that time, but it was the Madison campus. This was before the creation of the System, so there wasn’t a UW-Eau Claire, UW-Stevens Point. There was just the University of Wisconsin, which was in Madison.

He studied under E.B. Hart, who was actually a student of Stephen Babcock, whose name you probably know. So as a graduate student, Steenbock participated in what was called the single grain ration experiment. What they did was they took four cows; they fed one of the cows oats, one of them corn, another one wheat, and then a fourth one they fed with a mixture of all three as a control. What they did is they chemically altered these rations so that they had the same balance of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. As you know, probably, wheat has more protein than corn, but they adulterated the corn to make it have the same amount of protein as wheat. Or the other way around; they balanced it out. The idea here was, they’re either eating different grains that supposedly had the same balance of nutrition. And what happened is the cows all had different outcomes. Some of them had still-born calves. Some of them went blind. Some of them got very weak. And what this demonstrated was there’s something other than the macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat that you need for animals to be healthy– animals, including humans. And this was one of the foundational experiments in vitamin science. It made UW-Madison one of the centers for vitamin science, one of the centers of biochemistry. It was called Agricultural Chemistry at the time here, but it was one of the things that really made this campus great in terms of vitamin science. And this was Steenbock’s first publication, the first article he published actually in English. Yes, he published one in German as a student when he was abroad, but his first publication was the single grain ration results. And then he became a professor, and as a professor his laboratory discovered a process to use ultraviolet light to fortify food with vitamin D in 1923.

This was an outgrowth of vitamin experiments. He filed a patent on this. The patent was then assigned to WARF, and he helped with the original alumni of WARF, he helped found WARF, so WARF was his idea that became the first invention. It ended up earning about 14 million dollars, something around 200 million dollars if you adjust that for inflation. And this is the first seeds of WARF’s endowment. This is a basic overview of what Steenbock did, so that you’ll have a better sense of what I’m talking about, but I want to dig into this a little deeper, and I want to start. If you read the description for my talk, I describe this newspaper article very briefly. So this originally appeared in the Louisville Courier Journal for reasons you can probably understand. It originated in Kentucky, but it was syndicated across the country. I think this actual version actually came from Dubuque if I’m remembering correctly. But what they did, was so Seabiscuit, if you saw the movie a few years ago, or maybe read the book, he was a depression era inspiration story, kind of an underdog horse who then went on to set records for earning all kinds of winnings. And when this was published in 1940, he was at the end of his career, and they wanted to place his winnings in context to see just how much is it that he’d earned $437,000. How much is that compared to other famous careers? And so of course they picked Babe Ruth, another famous athlete, the President of the United States, and Greta Garbo. And you see these numbers, I pulled them out on the side so you could read them more easily. Basically what they’re saying here is that Seabiscuit won more money than the president earned during his administration. He won more money than Babe Ruth earned, or averaged, during his years as a baseball player, but he didn’t earn as much as a movie star. He didn’t earn as much as Greta Garbo. And then to add some balance to the piece, maybe give it some more weight, they had to find the regular guy. And it turned out they chose Harry Steenbock, who by this time had become somewhat famous because of his irradiation process. And so they compared his winnings to Seabiscuit’s. And what they found was that the humble scientist had earned less than all the rest of them here. $220,000 or about $6800 per year. Now the problem with this is that almost everything you can read in that little box is wrong. Some of it is close enough, some of it is basically right, and I’ll kind of have a pass, like I might quibble with it as a historian, but I’m fine with that. The part about curing rickets is pretty good. The money is not right. I’m not actually sure where they got these numbers. The truth of it is… so here’s what the Seabiscuit comparison said: $220,000 I went to the university archives, and I found Steenbock’s salary records. They’re on these little note cards, one of the note cards was missing, so I’m not entirely sure, I can’t be entirely sure what he earned, but piecing things together during the time of the Seabiscuit comparison he actually earned about $150,000. Part of the reason for this is that he was a graduate student from 1908 to 1916, so he was earning much less than what he did as a professor. So they actually highballed the number in terms of just his salary. But that’s just part of the story. The salary is actually a minority of what he actually earned as a scientist. So during the 1930’s, Capital Times, the newspaper still exists today. At the time it was edited by man named William Evjue. If you go the Badger football games, the Evjue press box, the Evjue Foundation is still a big charitable foundation locally. He’s kind of a famous name locally, but he and WARF didn’t see eye to eye on things, shall we say. WARF didn’t disclose its financial records at the time. Evjue didn’t like that. He was suspicious about private foundations. He believed that the university should only be taking public money. Universities should be funded by taxpayer dollars and nothing else, that was his stance. And he wanted to figure out how much money WARF was making. But they didn’t disclose it, but as a professor, he could access Steenbock’s personal income tax records. And so he used that. Evjue also knew that WARF paid its inventors 15% of net avail. So he could reverse engineer from Steenbock’s earnings what WARF was actually making. What he determined was that WARF had paid Steenbock about $617,000 over the course of 1929 to 1938, so over the course of a decade they’d paid him about $600,000. This is not quite right. I have access to WARF records. The audit reports year to year. What the audit reports show is that over the incoming earning life of Steenbock’s patents, 1928 to 1945, they paid him directly $700,000 or so. A little bit more than that. This is about half of what they actually paid him, however, because you also have to account for the special research accounts. Around 1937, Steenbock, because of things like the Capital Times investigation, because of the attention that would ultimately lead to the Seabiscuit comparison, he got very uncomfortable with the fact that he was getting paid a lot of money. He did not patent for money. That wasn’t what he got into this for, and he realized that it looked kind of bad. And he went to the trustees, and he said, “I’m not going to take any more of this.” He actually refused to take any more money. The trustees though said, “If you don’t take the money, “then no other scientist is going to give us their patents “because there’s just no incentive to do that. We really need you to do this.” They ended up with a compromise where they said they’re going to hold on to some of his royalties. They’ll keep it in a special account and if he wanted money for research in his laboratory, he could come to them and say, “I want some money for this year’s research.” So Evjue’s investigation didn’t find this because it wasn’t being paid to Steenbock. But I consider this part of Steenbock’s royalties, and it was. The trustees wanted it to be, and had he gone to the trustees and said, “I want all of this right now,” they would have given it to him. This is money that was in Steenbock’s control. So I count it together. Adding all this together, so 20 years, the Seabiscuit comparison, Steenbock was earning in royalties and salary about $965,000, a little less than a million dollars. Or about $30,000 per year. During Seabiscuit’s career, Steenbock earned $525,000, which is more than what Seabiscuit earned and this is total WARF royalties, Steenbock was paid about 1.4 million dollars in royalties. You’ll notice I said 14 million. This is a net number, so it was after expenses. It ended up being about 10% of the gross of the 14 million that the Steenbock patents earned. This still isn’t the entire story.
(light laughter)
When Steenbock died, 1967, his estate was worth 6.3 million dollars. This is how the State Journal reported it. You’ll notice that the Cap Times is more specific.
(light laughter)
$6,313,124 This was not what WARF had paid him. He had invested a lot of that money. It helps to have friends who run a foundation. This was his stocks and bonds, his insurance, his real estate. He actually became an art collector later in life. This is how much his estate was worth at the end of his life. If you adjust that for inflation, Steenbock was worth about 47 million dollars when he died. So obviously that number is bigger than any number there on the side. Now to be fair, you also have to adjust Greta Garbo’s dollars. She probably had about 80 million dollars, and this doesn’t include any investments or real estate that she may have had. But the point being, Steenbock wasn’t just in the top 1% of American income earners. He was in the top .01%. Top one hundredth of one percent of all American income earners based off the records I could find. What this means is to be richer than Harry Steenbock, you had to be Greta Garbo or Rockefeller or J. Paul Getty, or Henry Ford; it was inherited wealth. So Steenbock was a self-made man, I think you could say, but this is about as wealthy as you could get. Now, the real question is why did I just spend ten minutes of your life walking through the income of a professor in the middle of the 20th century? Well, the reason for that, I actually had a professor ask me that during my dissertation defense, and I will tell you what I told her, which is, “I didn’t come to grad school to write a biography of an obscenely wealthy white man.” That’s not what they teach us to do in PhD school. You’ve probably heard the saying that, “History is written by the winners.” We actually take that as an admonishment as academic historians. It’s not what we want to do. We understand that Churchill wrote his history of World War II, but we don’t just take that at face value. We want to interrogate it. We want to criticize it. And we know as historians these are some of the books that I’ve read that have taught me this over the course of my graduate career. We have to go out of our way to find the voices who are lost. To find the people who can’t speak for themselves. To find the poor, the downtrodden, the minorities, to really represent the full fabric of human history. We can’t just let the winners tell the story. We have to be critical about this. And so this posed a challenge for me. As I titled this slide– my slide formatting might be a little bit out of step here– but public history and critical history. I use the terms that political scientist Daniel Drezner used when he talked about thought leaders and public intellectuals. A thought leader is somebody who crafts a new narrative, who goes out and looks into the future and sees where we want to go to try to guide the conversation. And my job at WARF, I’m not a spokesman for WARF. I don’t officially speak for WARF. But I’m in the communications department, and what they want me to do is to look to our past to find out how can we still be a leader for the future? How can we continue to be one of the leading technology transfer offices in the country? And how do we shape the future? How do we do that? But as a historian, I was trained to be critical, to challenge these narratives, to test them to find out, to find the holes in some of them. And so for a while this was, I kind of wrestled with this. How do I be true to the values of my discipline while also trying to be a thought leader? How do I be a public intellectual and a thought leader? What I decided was really, it’s the challenge between those two things. Both of those roles, the thought leaders and public intellectuals, you need both of those things. If you read the New York Times OpEd page, maybe, like there’s the Thomas Friedman thought leaders and the Paul Krugman public intellectuals. We need both the bold thinkers who maybe say some things that they regret later, and the curmudgeons who are always complaining about something, right? We need both of these, and the challenge between that, that balance, that’s actually kind of the guiding force of what I want to do is to figure out how do I speak to both of those things. So how do I do that? I translate that question into what I would call three challenges. The first one is to challenge bloodless descriptions. This is the slide I showed you before. If you look closely at this, there’s not a lot of human beings on the slide. There’s the alumni, but other than that, there’s not a lot of pronouns. There’s not a lot of people, and so one of the things I want to do is tell the story in a more human way. Bring back the flesh and blood of the story of WARF and tell that story in a way that feels more resonant to us as human beings.

The second one is that the technology transfer industry can have a tendency to tell stories about itself that are little bit ahistorical. These slides give you the numbers since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. The Bayh-Dole Act established for the first time a national policy for the patenting of federally funded research. So it allowed universities to, if you had a federal grant, the university could still control the patent on that. So you can still develop and commercialize the technology. This is a very important turning point in the technology transfer industry. These are some of the numbers that happened from that. But you know I’m not as young as I used to be, but I’m still relatively young, and everything on this slide happened in my lifetime. Historians don’t tend to talk about things that happen in their lifetime. And there’s a much deeper longer story that I think deserves to be told that goes much further back than just this. And if you want to understand this story, you have to understand what was happening in 1925. You have to understand what was happening in the 19th century. History doesn’t just come out of nowhere. We have to understand the longer history of this. And then the third challenge is, I’ll just sort of leave their pictures up there, and you can see they all have something in common, and it’s not just the photography, right? This is the second generation of WARF trustees. The guy here at the head of this table is Donald Slichter. He’s the son of Charles Slichter, who was in the previous slide. Donald Slichter was, by the way, the president and chairman of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance company. When he was president, they were just completing a Great Lakes freighter that was the largest on the lakes at the time. He chaired the meeting where they decided what to name that freighter, and they decided to name it after his predecessor, who was Edmund Fitzgerald. So if there’s any Gordon Lightfoot fans here…
(light laughter)
he wasn’t responsible for the sinking, he was responsible for what that was named. And this also shows you the financial results that WARF had achieved by the time this photo was taken around I believe 1950, somewhere around there. And this shows you that WARF was starting to make a pretty good sum of money. If you want to be rich, be sure to invest in the beginning of the Great Depression. Steenbock patents started earning money about 1928. That’s a pretty good time to be in the market. And so WARF was doing pretty well for itself. Just to drive this point home, I want to tell this story kind of in the full disclosure way. This is Thomas Brittingham, Jr. This is a painting of him that is at the WARF tower. He crafted the investment policy that led to those results. You may know the Brittingham name from Brittingham Park, from the Brittingham house is where the university system president lives. Brittingham’s father financed the Abraham Lincoln statue in Bascom Hill. So his life actually, the purpose of his career was built off of literally managing the money that his father left behind. He manages the trust fund that his lumber baron father gave him. So if you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, you may have heard about this. There was a group in the 1920’s on campus that called itself the Ku Klux Klan. And Thomas Brittingham, Jr. happened to be a member of that. He graduated in 1921 around the time that this group was being founded. This is obviously problematic. Now… this wasn’t the national KKK. This wasn’t the southern KKK.

But that’s kind of damning with faint praise, right? That’s not much of an improvement if you’re going to name yourself after the group. It’s not that much better. But what’s happening in the 20’s at the time was– So, World War I had just happened. Nationalism was very vibrant. A lot of racism was resurgent, not that it ever went away, but this is kind of a vibrant time. So, The Birth of a Nation was a movie that you may have heard of that was one of the most, before Gone with the Wind, this was the most widely watched movie in American history. It’s an explicitly racist movie. And it was playing on campus here. And the culture of the times, this was in the air. And so they named their group after the Ku Klux Klan because the Birth of a Nation had told this story, because it was thought to be this historic group. After a few years, that hubbub dies down. They start to rethink these things. And one of the other crucial things that happens is the actual klan shows up on campus. They don’t call themselves the KKK. They call themselves Kappa Beta Lambda, KBL, which in secret means Klansmen, be loyal. And they start recruiting engineers and farmers and the more working class, the lower class parts of students. They weren’t the leaders that joined the fraternal group that was the KKK. So those guys say, you know what, this kind of looks bad. We’re going to change the name. They changed it to Tumas. Literally translating Tumas from Latin means you are male. So they said, we’re going to downplay the racism. We’re going to play up the masculinity. We’re going to lean into the masculine part of this. And so one of the guys in the picture I showed you that was Don Slichter there was Walter Frautschi, and he was part of the group that changed the name along with Porter Butts and Frederic March. If you remember the controversy that happened a few months ago, Porter Butts and Frederic March had their name on places in the Memorial Union, and the union decided after a long debate to take their names off of them. All three of those guys, Butts, March, and Frautschi were part of the group that changed the name, but I think that’s literally the least they could have done was to take the name KKK off the group, right? So I give them some credit for that, but I’m not here to lionize them. I’m here to tell you this story to show you this is the problem I’m wrestling with. The people that I’m studying, there’s a problematic history here. This is the 20th century United States, racism was real. So how do I deal with this specifically in my dissertation? Well, there’s three ways. First of all, if I find racism, I write about it. This is one specific to Steenbock. I won’t read that, but you can tell he’s using racial slurs to describe George Kido. This is in 1947. Kido was an entomologist at UCLA. He was actually granted his PhD in absentia because he was a graduate student at UCLA during the war, and his family was shipped to an internment camp. So his advisor had to sneak in his insect samples, so that he could complete his PhD in absentia, and he was granted it in absentia. After the war, he got a post doc at UW-Madison. His supervising professor recommended him to WARF. And he ended up– He was being considered being hired to be a full-time head of WARF’s insecticide laboratories, which was a thing WARF had at the time. We don’t have those now. And Steenbock wrote this letter to the trustees to say he opposed the idea. And he opposed it on explicitly racist terms. He’s using a lot of stereotypes about Japanese scientists, about trafficking in Asian stereotypes. And you can kind of see where there are. He happens to be entirely wrong about this. Kido’s advisor thought he was a great scientist, and it’s not true that Japanese scientists were considered to be of a lesser class, but this is Steenbock’s attitude. The problem with this is that Kido was born to Japanese immigrant parents in California. He attended the state schools in his state. He got a scientific degree, scientific PhD. He got his scientific PhD during a time when the country of his ancestors was at war with the country of his birth, the United States. All of those things I could just say I could say about Harry Steenbock. He was the grandson of German immigrants. He didn’t speak English until he was five. He went to the state schools in his state. Got a scientific PhD. And while he was getting a scientific PhD, it was during World War I when the country of his ancestors is fighting the country of his birth. The Germans were fighting the Americans. So he should have been able to see a lot of commonality between the two, but as racism often happens, it gets in the way of empathy, and he didn’t see that. All he saw was Kido’s race. It was used as something of a problem, right? The second thing I do is if I find the women, I talk about the women. And there can be kind of a dismissive attitude that oh, well we just kind of got to add women to the story. Women were central to Steenbock’s life. He was very close with his mother. The relationship with his mother was pretty important to understanding who he became as a person. He had one sibling, who was a sister, who was two years older than him. She was two years older than him, but she started college at the same time because she had to stay behind for two years and take care of the apartment that they stayed in when they went into town to go to high school. And his relationship with his sister was also very important to forming who he was. I’ll also point out a couple things. This is a scientific article that Steenbock published, and you’ll notice that he co-authored it with Mariana Sell and Mary Buell. Those are two women. Steenbock very rarely published a paper just with his own name, and very often his co-authors were women, who were either his students or they were fellow biochemists. Mary Buell, actually, if you know the Buell House in University Heights, it was the first house in University Heights. She grew up in that house. She was the first woman to earn her PhD in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin. I believe it was 1921. I always forget the exact year, but it was 1919-1921 when she was there. According to Harry’s sister, they were an item for a while, and they probably would have gotten married except that Mary wanted to have a career, and Steenbock didn’t want that. So she left and went to Iowa State. And then she came back and worked at the Enzyme Institute on Old University Avenue for a while. And then the other woman on this slide, I always like to tell her story. I didn’t end up writing about in my dissertation because she kind of comes into the WARF story after 1925. But this is Lucy O’Keefe. She was hired as a secretary. She was one of the first three employees that WARF hired full-time, and you can see in this slide here, her initials are here. This means that Harry Steenbock wrote the letter, dictated a letter, and Lucy O’Keefe typed it for him. This is Harry Russell, different WARF director, and she did the same thing, so there’s evidence that she’s there. But she went on to become WARF’s office manager and was actually part of the WARF leadership team by the 40’s. She worked at WARF for about 30 years and rose up the ladder and was a very important person in WARF’s history. I like to compare her to, if you’re a fan of the show Mad Men, she’s very similar to the character Joan Holloway. Setting aside some of the more scandalous parts of Mad Men, I don’t have any evidence that Lucy was having affairs or drinking a lot or anything like that, but it’s a similar story. Somebody who started in just a pool of typists and rose her way up to actually being an executive at WARF. And I like to tell her story because of that. So Steenbock’s women were essential to Steenbock’s life, and people have told the Steenbock story before without including women in it and you just don’t understand it if you don’t understand the women.

So the next thing I like to talk about is that Steenbock wasn’t born white. He was born German, as I said he didn’t speak English until he was five. He and his sister started kindergarten a year after the Bennett Law was repealed. The Bennett Law was a Wisconsin law, which mandated that all primary schools teach in English. It caused such a backlash that the Republicans actually got swept out of office and the Democrats were brought in and they repealed it. Harry and his sister Helen started school right after that had all happened, and they were still made fun of because they, not only did they speak German, they spoke plat deutsche, which is the lowland German, and the Prussians would make fun of them for having an accent. And the English speakers would make fun of them for not knowing English. But as you can see, this is a quote from Helen Steenbock Brinsmade, who is Harry’s sister, talking about the freedom and liberty that she learned from Carl Schurz. Carl Schurz is this German American immigrant, who is kind of a quintessential example of assimilation, German assimilation. How to maintain your Germanness but also become quintessentially American. She quoted him as being their ancestor. This is an article that was written under Steenbock’s name. I’m not entirely sure if he wrote it, or if the university press office wrote it on his behalf. But he’s also quoting Carl Schurz as being the source of the reform and the Wisconsin idea, basically. The Wisconsin traditions of research came out of Carl Schurz, and he’s German-American. It shows you that this is important part of their heritage. I did go back and look and found out that Helen was saying in this that her grandparents were fleeing, were on Schurz’s side and were fleeing the Prussians, were fleeing the Kaiser. Actually their grandparents fought, her grandfather fought in the Prussian army, which put down Carl Schurz revolution, 1848. So it’s a little messier history than that, but it’s more important is to understand the ideology. This is the way they thought of themselves. They identified as Germans more so than just sort of like white Midwesterners, right. So what this ends up adding up to is that what I refer to Steenbock as a mugwump in one of the chapters. Does anybody know the term mugwump? Nobody raised their hands, by the way, for you at home, just so you know, not to call you out, but I have to let them know. So a mugwump is kind of like being a grand poohbah. The people who were called mugwumps, their enemies were calling them this to say that they’re these high-minded kind of highfalutin kind of types. But this is a 19th century reform tradition that grew out of things like abolition, things like the temperance movement. The idea was that it put a lot of emphasis on moral uplift. On doing the right thing, on social obligation, on reforming corruption, and this tradition is very strong in Wisconsin. And I think you can see a lot of the things that Steenbock is writing here, this is how he explained the purpose of WARF in 1940. He’s referencing a lot of mugwump traditions. What happened in the 20th century was you have kind of a split, so you have progressives on one hand, who are saying if we actually want these reforms to happen, we’re going to have to be more aggressive. We’re going to have to do things like really support unions. We’re going to have to have a progressive income tax. We’re going to have to start institute direct election of senators, primary elections, things like that. The big reform movements that we all associate with the thoughts of Progressives. There were other branches of mugwumps who basically said, “No, we’re going to emphasize the individual part of this.” And this becomes the formation of this kind of associational individual-minded conservatism of the 20th century. And Steenbock, as you can see from this slide, took that second route. As I say in my dissertation, he was conservative in every sense of the word. He continued to be a mugwump long after that was an outdated terminology. So things like, what he’s saying here is basically he wanted something like WARF to prevent the government from running the university. He wanted to prevent the socialization of university. He wanted to show that individual professors could actually stand up for what they believed in and not have to rely on government funding to do that. But the other thing I want to point out about this slide is its universalizing language. He’s not saying, “I grew up German, therefore I believe this.” He’s not saying, “My relationship with my mother informed me.” I could go through all these things and kind of talk about why, how I see Steenbock’s childhood in some of these things. I can see how this is a very peculiar way of talking about things. He’s kind of washing all of that way. He’s kind of avoiding all of that. He’s not talking about that. He’s not talking about his German heritage. So the story I want to tell about Steenbock is one that really recovers his humanity. And I’m not trying to expose his racism or expose his sexism necessarily. I’m not trying to be William Evjue digging up his tax returns. Like that’s not the point of what I’m trying to do. I’m just trying to remember his humanity and include his humanity in that story and tell it in a way that he’s a sinner in a broken world like everybody else. That’s basically what I’m trying to remind people, so that when he says facts are facts and logic is logic, there’s nothing really universal about the Steenbock story. It’s a very unusual peculiar– He’s a weird dude.
(light laughter)
Put it that way, right, and we have a tendency to think that a guy who was white and male and made a good living in the 20th century was somehow normal, and that’s actually not really the case.

So first, that’s kind of my methods, but being a historian I can’t just say that and expect you to believe it. We have to actually go back and find sources. These are all things that I concluded after about five years of researching Harry Steenbock’s life. So let’s go back to the beginning. The first question I asked, and I actually thought this was just going to be like the first chapter, which was why did Steenbock patent? It ended up being basically the whole dissertation. So I had to figure out why did he patent. This is the guy who’s famous for patenting. The guy who got published in newspapers because of his patent. Why did he do it? And so I found a manuscript he first wrote in late 1925, finalized early in January 1926. It was called “The relations of the writer to the Wisconsin alumni research foundation and the events that led to its organization.” I won’t say that again, but it’s a long title. But it’s him writing at the time, this is why I did what I did. And you had this sentence which was pretty clear. The oleo margarine manufacturer can make his product superior to butter. What he is saying is that if they use my vitamin fortification process on margarine, then they will be able to compete with butter. And the dairy industry is a strong supporter of the college of agriculture. He didn’t want margarine to be competing with butter. Like that’s kind of a long story short. He wanted to prevent the fortification of margarine. That was what originally motivated him. But it, of course, this is only the top of the slide, right. So you know it’s going to be a little more complicated than that. This is the beginning of that sentence. “In the meantime, another matter came up.” In the meantime of what? Like I went back to this manuscript to find the beginning of the story. What is this “in the meantime” business? What do I got to go finding out now? Where are we going with this, right? In the meantime, so this is how that manuscript actually begins. “In 1920, the writer and coworkers discovered that vitamin A” Now wait a minute. Now I’ve got to go learn about vitamin A. What’s this stuff? I thought this was a vitamin D story. Also, what do you mean coworkers? What’s this coworkers’ business? Because if you look at the patent, there’s no coworkers. There’s just Harry Steenbock. Yes, he assigned it to WARF, but WARF didn’t exist in 1920. So what does all this mean? How do I make sense of this? There’s a vitamin A story. There seems to be an earlier invention that has something to do– That’s not about irradiating food. What do I do with all of this? So I then go to his articles. So this is the article that, “Fat-Soluble Vitamins 17” This is the article. At the bottom of this he says that he and Archie Black published this article about the irradiation of foods using ultraviolet light. At the bottom they say, “We have the intention of filing a patent.” Patents had been filed for this. And he also noticed that the University of Wisconsin patents had been filed to be handled to the University of Wisconsin, so obviously something changed there because he ended up not giving it to Wisconsin. He ended up creating WARF. So that’s another interesting part of this story. And then the second part. Well, there’s the coworkers. There’s this A Black. Who is this Archie Black guy? What do I want to know about him? And here’s another part. That’s a Roman numeral seventeen.

This wasn’t the beginning of the story. There are sixteen articles that came before this. So now I got to go read seventeen scientific articles. I’m not a biochemist. I got in this to write about patents. Okay, so what do we have? Well, turns out fat-soluble vitamin series was the central work of Steenbock’s life. I put the last one up here so I can remember the number. 42 different installments stretching all the way back to 1921, 1920 to 1934.

Actually, sorry, 1918. 1918 to 1934. So there’s 40 articles of these, and I had to kind of walk through what does this all talk about? Fat-soluble vitamin 6 was the one “in the meantime” business when he talks about he and coworkers working on vitamin A. What he was talking about was a concentrated form of vitamin A. That they’d used alfalfa and other vegetative matter to concentrate vitamin A into a concentrated form. And that’s what he was talking about, and that was actually the first time he tried to patent was on this concentrated vitamin A. But then you can also see there’s a couple other things here I don’t think I have any other highlights on this, but you see 17 and 19. The titles are basically the same between 17 and 19. We’re also talking about this isn’t one article. This wasn’t just an article that they published and this is the invention and we’re going to patent it. There’s an ongoing scientific story happening here that stretches all the way back. The other thing I want to point out is they didn’t start out as fat-soluble vitamins. They started out as fat-soluble vitamine. That’s because at the time they thought there was only one that was fat-soluble.

So in order to understand all of that, I have to go back and understand the ancient history of vitamins, which goes all the way back to ancient Egypt. So ancient Egyptians knew that if you ate liver, you were less likely to go night blind. And what we know now is that’s because liver has vitamin A in it.

You also had sunlight.

We’ll start with the limes there. You may have heard a story about the limeys. That the English sailors figured out that they were getting scurvy and that if you fed them limes and in some cases sauerkraut, they would not get scurvy. That’s because limes have vitamin C in it. And in Norway they would feed kids cod liver oil to prevent them from getting rickets during the winter. And they also knew that one of the reasons why you get rickets in the winter is because there’s no sunlight. Because sunlight creates vitamin D. So these old wive’s tales, these traditional stories, they didn’t know why these were happening and a lot of scientists weren’t even sure that these were real, but there was just accumulating evidence that there was something happening here that was going on.

So while the history of those vitamins is really ancient, the science of it is not that old. The people on this slide, the two guys on the left here are Christiaan Eijkman and Frederick Gowland Hopkins. Eijkman’s on the top. They actually end up winning a joint Nobel prize for the discovery of vitamins. Eijkman was working in the Dutch East Indies on water soluble vitamins. He basically figured out that if you polish rice, that it takes out some sort of substance and if you ate polished rice, you get Beriberi. And Beriberi is a deficiency of vitamin B, and this is a water soluble substance. Hopkins was the one who figured out that it was the accessory factors. If you added milk, to a diet of mice, their bones would be stronger. And so this is the first realization that there’s some accessory factor that ended up being a fat soluble factor, which becomes vitamin A.

So around the 1920’s, so Casimir Funk is the guy in the middle. He was the one who came up with the term vitamine. He was studying thiamine, which we know now is a B vitamin. And he was also working on rice. And he made the proposition that all of these accessory factors were amines, which is a nitrogen compound. And so he thought, “Okay, they’re vital, but amines, we’ll call ’em vitamines.” That was his idea, and he coined the term. The problem with that is they’re not all amines. And so eventually, long story short, eventually they drop the “e” and it’s vitamins. And so these two here in the center, this is Marguerite Davis and Elmer McCollum. They’re working in parallel. They’re working off the basis of Hopkins. Hopkins isn’t even the beginning of this story. There’s also people in eastern Europe. There’s lots of people kind of piecing all this stuff together. All this stuff is coming around and around the 1910’s or so, so Marguerite Davis was a woman. She had to move back to Madison because her mother died and so she had to take care of her father. She had to drop out of school in California and came back and she was looking for a job one day and just kind of walked into McCollum. Elmer McCollum was a professor at Wisconsin. She walked into his office, and he said, “Okay, you can help me with my experiments.” And all they did was discover vitamin A basically. Well, they got credit for discovering vitamin A. The problem with that is, as I said, these two guys won on the left side, they won the Nobel prize. McCollum claimed to be the discoverer of vitamin A. He called himself that, but what they actually did is they just named it. They named it vitamin A. They isolated the factor that ended up becoming the fat-soluble A and what they called it was fat-soluble A. Casimir Funk is over here calling them vitamins. And eventually they kind of negotiated it so that, McCollum hated the word vitamin because he didn’t think it was accurate. But eventually there’s a compromise and fat-soluble A becomes vitamin A. Fat-soluble B becomes vitamin B. And then they discover that the fat-soluble vitamin is actually two things. It’s vitamin A and vitamin D, and so now we’re going to call them vitamin A and vitamin D. They’re two separate things. So this is the, here on the right, this is Babcock and Harry Russell. This is Babcock here. This is William Henry, Henry Maw is named after him. Right out here up front. This is E.B. Hart. This is George Humphrey, and that’s Harry Russell. But these guys were the ones who worked with Steenbock on the single grain ration experiment.

And that was also where Elmer McCollum originated as well. He was a junior professor here at Wisconsin, and he actually taught Steenbock his first graduate seminar. And Steenbock knew all this history. It’s also interesting that he claimed a patent by himself. He actually wrote histories of all of this that all of these vitamins were being discovered. This is a long history. He’s writing a longer version of that. So what does Steenbock actually discover? So he’s working on the narrow question of fat-soluble D, vitamin D. It was actually called the antirachitic vitamin because it had not yet become what we know now as vitamin D. And so people had figured out, it’s another World War I story. So after World War I, Harriette Chick, who worked for the Lister Institute, as in Listerine. It was an English institute, but she was actually working in Vienna after the war. And the reason she went to Vienna was because a lot of children were starving. A lot of children were getting rickets, and there’s a lot of nutritional problems. She was leading a team there, that was trying to figure out how to make them healthier. How to solve their malnutrition. And they had understood by this point and were honing on the science that rickets could be prevented both by putting children out in the sunlight, putting them on balconies. You give them sunlight, and they would have stronger bones. Or you could feed them cod liver oil. And they knew that this Norwegian fisher folk solution, they were actually showing that it could work. The confusing part was that nobody could quite figure out why these two things worked together. Cod liver oil and sunlight. Sitting out in the sun and eating cod liver oil. They don’t seem to have anything in common. Nobody could quite figure out, “Okay, what’s the connection here?” And so the Lister people under Harriette Chick– And by the way, so Harriette Chick has two assistants, Margaret Hume and Hannah Henderson Smith. They’re not actually her assistants, but they work in her laboratory, and they start trying to test out these experiments. So what they have is they have rats that they’re putting in jars and they irradiate one rat and they’ll feed the rat some cod liver oil. They’ll actually feed them liver sometimes to feed them. And they noticed that when they leave the rats overnight, together, but somehow if you irradiate one rat, put it in the same cage with a rat that has not been irradiated overnight, over the course of time both of the rats don’t get rickets. Both of them seem to be protected. And they couldn’t figure out why this was happening. So they try to test it. So they actually keep the rats separate. They keep the jars separate. They irradiate the jar. They put the rats in the jar. They actually keep the other rat down the room and then put them in the jar at the same time. And yet, the rats in the same jar are still both being cured from rickets. They can’t figure out what is happening here because they’ve kept the rats separate, so they know that there’s no contamination. They know that the rat isn’t accidentally getting some light or some kind of thing like this. And they come up with this hypothesis that the vitamins are jumping between the rats somehow. Maybe it’s, when you irradiate the air, the air becomes vitamin D, becomes antirachitic, as we call it. Antirachitic meaning it cures rickets. And so the idea is that the air is charged. There’s some science at the time that kind of suggests that this kind of makes sense. So Steenbock is reading all of this. He knows Frederic Hopkins. He knows Christiaan Eijkman. He’s been working with McCollum. He knows all of this story. He doesn’t buy this idea that the vitamin D is jumping from air to air. And so he comes up with the idea that they’re going to irradiate the rations basically, but first they need to test it. The first thing they tried to do is they tried to reproduce the Lister experiments.

At first, they invent a process where the refuse in the cage was dropping through a wire at the bottom. So they know, they think that’s what’s happening is they’re eating the sawdust. They’re going to test that theory, so they put wire in the bottom of the cage, and all the refuse is dropping through the bottom, yet it’s still happening. They’re still having rats that have not been irradiated that are being cured by vitamin D. Sorry, seem to be getting vitamin D somehow. They can’t figure out why that’s the case. Then what they do is they clean the screen. The wire mesh that they’ve been putting at the bottom of the cage and been falling it through. Then they clean it, so that it’s not sticky anymore. And then when they try it now, now the rat who’s not being irradiated, who’s not being fed anything, any vitamin D, now that rat does get sick. And they didn’t actually know at the time why that was happening. What we now know is that for the same reason that when you absorb vitamin D through the skin that what’s happening is that the sunlight is hitting the fat in your skin, and it’s fortifying the vitamin D. And so what’s happening is the rats were rubbing up against the wire. The grease from their hair was rubbing on the wire, and then they were gnawing on the wire. So they’re eating the fat, and they’re absorbing the fat. From that process that’s what they were doing. Steenbock didn’t understand the science behind this process. All he knew is he could test it and he could prove it. And so then they took out the middleman. They said we’re just going to irradiate the rations. The food directly. It’ll feed the rats that way, and that worked. This proved that there was a process, you could now fortify food with vitamin D.

This still doesn’t explain why he patented it. So am I still with you? Have I explained the science well enough? So you’re all following it well enough? Okay. So this explains the science of it, right? It explain that this is a communal process. This is a process that he’s drawing on long traditions of science and technology, but it doesn’t explain then why is he– He knows that he is coauthoring these. He even said himself, the writer and coworkers invented a process. So how did this then lead to him wanting to file for a patent? Well, one thing you need to understand first of all is he had a couple of different models to work from. One was Stephen Babcock.

So you know Babcock if you know the Madison campus. You know Babcock ice cream. You know Babcock Hall. You may also know that this is the butter fat test, the famous Babcock butter fat test. Babcock, as I think I explained earlier, was one of the people who had figured out that okay, protein, carbohydrates, and fats. He had this theory that all these people are saying that protein, carbohydrates, and fats are all you need to eat to be healthy, but he knew that he could doctor a piece of cow manure to have the right amount of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and he knew he wasn’t going to feed a piece of manure to a cow. To the cow, that’s not enough. And so he wanted to test this theory out. The problem was he tried to do that at first and a couple cows died. One of them died and one of them got very sick and almost died, and the animal husbandry guy on campus was pretty upset by this, and William Henry said, “Okay, I’m taking you off this project, you can’t do this. I need you to go do this other thing, which is way more practical, which maybe isn’t a great use of your German education.” Babcock is one of the world’s great trained German chemists at the time. And what Henry says is, “I need you to go figure out how to measure butter fat for farmers because it’s a problem that is facing the industry.” And this is something that farmers had tried to do. Farmers had tried to do it themselves. Other chemists had tried to do this. Nobody had been able to figure out. The reason why this is a problem is because if you aren’t able to measure the butter fat in milk accurately, then wholesalers might skim it and try to sell 2% milk as 1% milk, or they might try to basically douse it with water and try to sell it, and you don’t figure it out until you get home. Like, this is a problem. The milk markets are not very stable because of this. This is a serious industry problem. Babcock being an expert scientist figures this out, figures out the Babcock butter fat test and it revolutionizes the industry. It really is kind of why we know today Wisconsin is the dairy state was because Stephen Babcock figured out how to do this and turn dairy from an ancient trade into a scientific art. There are some calculations that you save– Within a couple years, he saved the dairy industry the entire equivalent of the UW-Madison budget within just a couple of years, a couple hundred thousand dollars of course at the time. So he becomes famous. He is world famous. I can go through the Capital Times and the State Journal and you can see every time when Babcock turns 70, when he turns 71, when he turns 77, it gets that front page story in the paper and they’re throwing a party. They’re having all these birthday parties. Part of this myth of Babcock is that he didn’t patent the test. He refused to patent the test because this was basically the ethics of science at the time where that you need to give away. Scientists don’t profit off of this.

He also said though that because he didn’t patent it,

it took a lot longer for the test to be standardized, to be used very well. He couldn’t control it. There were a lot of bad versions of the test.

His name gets dragged through the mud a little bit, and this becomes part of that story. But Steenbock is living with this living legend. Babcock is retired by the time, but he knew Babcock. They worked together in the same place. He saw Babcock all the time and you have this story. This is the communal model of how science should work. Babcock didn’t do this for himself. He did this for the state, and this is his social obligation, as I told you, the mugwump kind of idea. The social obligation of science to benefit the world. The other model is a slightly negative example. So I’ve told you, McCollum earlier, that he claimed to be the discoverer of vitamin A. The story is more complicated than that; it’s a group effort, it’s a collective effort.

McCollum had actually a reputation for working with women like Marguerite Davis. There are other women, Nita Simmons, who was a student who had followed McCollum to Johns Hopkins when he left. And a woman named Cornelia Kennedy. There was actually a master’s thesis written by Cornelia Kennedy that was a first ever document to use the term fat-soluble A and water-soluble B.

McCollum originally gave Cornelia Kennedy credit. When he would write about the fact that he was the first one, he’d sort of discovered this nomenclature, he would cite the article ’cause he was Cornelia Kennedy’s advisor, so he was the coauthor on the master’s thesis. He would cite that master’s thesis. Over time, he kind of forgot to include that. He started citing a later article, and basically he said, “I was the one who came up with this.” And so after McCollum leaves, he leaves for Johns Hopkins, and you may have gotten ahead of me ’cause I’ve left the slide up here, and you can now read the story. There’s a controversy called professional courtesy. What this controversy was was EB Hart wrote a letter to science basically saying that when McCollum left he took a lot of notebooks. He actually published then with Nita Simmons. He published a couple articles that were based off of Wisconsin research and he published it under the Johns Hopkins name. So he did not get the permission to publish it from the director of the experiment station at Wisconsin, and he didn’t credit Harry Steenbock. He didn’t include Steenbock’s name. And so they’re basically saying professional courtesy demands that Steenbock was part of those experiments. You should have included him as a coauthor. You didn’t. McCollum writes back, and he just basically says, “I didn’t include Steenbock because he didn’t really do anything that important.” Steenbock then writes back. This is kind of where I learned you don’t mess with Harry Steenbock. He wrote a letter back and he said, “I conceived the experiments. I did most of the work on the experiments. Me and Nita Simmons did all this work. All McCollum did was feed the rats.”
(laughter)
And on top of that, and this part didn’t become public, and there’s not really many sources for this, but apparently when McCollum left, one of the things I think McCollum does deserve credit for, I don’t think he deserves as much credit for discovering vitamin A, because there’s all of these other people that are doing it, but he does deserve credit for being the first person to create a rat colony at the UW-Madison campus. This is actually the first person in the world to have a laboratory rat colony. The problem was when he left for Johns Hopkins, he let all the rats go.
(audience gasps)
And so Steenbock, they had to go out and either find the rats or just buy new rats, and kind of reconstitute the colony. There are letters later on. There was the Babcock Dairy Club wanted to invite McCollum back to give a speech. And Steenbock wrote them a letter saying, “You really don’t want to do this. We do not like this guy. He is not a friend of the university.” And so you see here is a claiming of credit that Steenbock did not want to follow. And so after this incident, McCollum had a reputation for working with women. He would then write an autobiography later, emphasizing Marguerite Davis, telling the story about this woman that he invited into his laboratory and all these kinds of stories. He portrayed himself as this early feminist, but there are letters of people writing back and forth that basically said, “No no no, the reason he worked with women is “because they couldn’t do what Harry Steenbock did.” If they published a letter like this in science, nobody was going to pay any attention to them because they’re women, so he surrounded himself with women because they couldn’t take the risk of challenging him.

That’s why he did it, and so everybody in Wisconsin following the Babcock example, following this community example, we’re a team, we’re working to support the dairy industry, we’re working to support our home state, they don’t like McCollum. They don’t drag his name through the mud. There was some talk about after he stole the research notebooks that they were going to arrest him. Steenbock wrote a letter saying, we thought about calling the police. We decided not to.

I forget the term exactly, but he said we don’t want to air our dirty linen, that kind of thing. Steenbock has this example in mind, and one of Steenbock’s cousins in an interview later said, “Of course, the McCollum affair left him bitterly disappointed.” This is one of the shaping things that shapes the way Steenbock thinks about scientific credit. He has a positive example of Babcock and he has a negative example of McCollum. This gives you a little bit of an example, a little bit of understanding of why this question of how to serve the dairy industry is tooling around in Steenbock’s mind, why he might want to take this discovery, which he knows is part of a whole scientific discourse. Taught a very complicated history of vitamins, which no single person really deserves the single amount of credit. But he knows that something has to happen here. To fulfill his social obligation, he’s kind of working with this. All of these things about reputation and gender and all these things are working around in his mind. The second part, so I kind of got a little ahead of myself. I shouldn’t have shown you that slide while I was telling you that story. These are academic traditions of Wisconsin. This is the dairy barn, which is over a couple blocks away. At the time it was a total show palace. It’s basically the equivalent of what the Discovery Building is today. You had a ramp that would take a truck of hay up to the third floor. And you could rotate it around, dump the hay out and take the ramp all the way back down. The ramp doesn’t exist anymore. It’s fallen into a little disrepair, but the idea of this was to show if you fund science, you farmers out in Wisconsin, this is what we can do for you. It had a cooling system that was incredibly advanced for its time. It circulated the air. All kinds of crazy things. You could see all of these filigrees, and all this kind of architecture that’s all kind of very fancy. If you stand right next to it today, it’s still pretty impressive. There’s a silo right next to it that’s taller than that, but that one’s still pretty impressive. I think at the time it was like the largest silo in the world. It’s all made of brick, and it’s an advanced kind of system. You have the Babcock example. These are all things that, you know, Steenbock, son of Wisconsin, is thinking about all these things. These are all shaping the type of science that he’s doing, so he’s competing with historians– Oh, sorry, historians… Freudian slip.

He’s competing with biochemists in England, Yale, Cambridge, Utrecht, all of these German and European universities that are the greatest universities in the world at the time. And then also Columbia where you have pediatricians. You have Harriette Chick and the Lister Institute. By the way, Harriette Chick is a woman running a laboratory, and she has PhD working for her. These are not women who are– I forgot to mention this before, but these are not women who are secretaries or assistants. These are women working for women who all have PhDs. And they’re all the greatest scientist in the world. So one of the main competitors of Steenbock is in Columbia where they have pediatricians working on this same question of rickets. How do we try to help babies who are starving? They’re working on cows, and to understand why this is sort of an industrial story and a commercial story, a collective story, it’s because this is the agricultural campus. They’re studying it in cows. They’re not studying it in babies. And this is a different kind of science, and it leads into different insights and different conclusions. One of them being, this is a bottle of– our director of investments at WARF sent me a picture of this and she said, “We don’t understand why there’s a vitamin D bottle at this flea market.” I said, “That’s not a vitamin D bottle. That’s a milk bottle, that’s a milk cap.” This is one of the early examples of vitamin D milk. It might be a little too dark, but if you can see around the edge there, it says the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

So if you bought vitamin D milk in the 1930’s, odds were it would be stamped with the WARF seal of approval because it meant that it’d been to the WARF control laboratories and they had tested it and to show that it actually had the vitamin D that was in that. And so there’s no coincidence that you end up with an experiment on cows then leading toward the creation of vitamin D milk. There’s a reason why all that happens. It’s from Wisconsin. Actually on eBay, I just bought this. This is a milk cap that I found.
(laughter)
It only cost me two bucks. It’s still in pretty good shape. But then there’s another third part of this story, which is that there has to be financial and political opportunity. So as I said, “in the meantime” sentence, that I showed you before. Steenbock had this vitamin A concentrate, and he was just as concerned about vitamin A, the vitamin concentrate margarine as he was vitamin D, so milk does have vitamin A in it, so you could make margarine equal to butter if you had a vitamin A concentrate. If you added his concentrate to margarine, then margarine could be equal. But nobody was, at the time, universities didn’t patent or license anything. They weren’t in the patenting and licensing business. So basically, they said if you want to go patent that, that’s fine. If you want to do what Charles Burgess the battery guy did, the Burgess Batter company, and you want to go off and patent, we’ll let you do that, but the university isn’t really in the patenting business. And so eventually after Steenbock kind of badgered them for a while, they hired a lawyer, but they didn’t pay the lawyer, so the lawyer just kind of lets the application sit there and eventually it expires and they can’t do anything about it.

So then, this vitamin D thing comes along. And not only with vitamin A, and this is what Steenbock said, with the vitamin A thing you could make margarine that was equal to butter. With vitamin D, you could make a margarine that was better than butter because butter doesn’t have vitamin D in it. And so he’s even more concerned about this, and on top of that, he had discovered a guy from the Mellon Institute had written him a letter saying, “Could you tell me about your vitamin A concentrate because I’d like to learn a little bit more about that. Could you tell me how much alfalfa to use? All this kind of thing. How much vitamin A can you actually pull out of it? Steenbock wrote him back. This is what you do as a scientist. You exchange it. And then Steenbock’s reading a journal, and he notices this announcement that this guy who’d just written him was working on a fellowship from the Swift Margarine Company. And so Steenbock has this in his– I found it in his papers, and there’s this blue pencil circling the margarine word. Underling margarine, margarine, margarine. They got me. They snuck in. They stole my science. I told the administrators they were going to do that. So this vitamin D thing, so he wants to do it better the second time around. What’s different this time? Well, first of all, Quaker Oats has a farm on the Madison campus. Quaker Oats was looking for– It actually started with, they were looking for a way to make money off of all the discarded hulls that come out of the oatmeal making process. And so Quaker Oats is headquartered in Chicago. They have a big plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that is still there. You can drive by. And they have a farm they created on the Madison campus. It’s part of a development and around the time of industrial fellowships. Quaker Oats was sponsoring industrial fellows, beginning to sponsor industrial fellows in the college of agriculture. And one of the things that happens is that they used the Forest Products Laboratory had these giant machines, and they were able to distill the oat hulls down into a substance called furfural, which was a very rare substance before that. But with this process, furfural becomes a very common chemical and Quaker Oats becomes like the world’s leading producer of furfural. There’s a guy named Charles Minor, who’s a consulting chemist with Quaker, and he knows about Steenbock’s work. He’s keeping up to date on it. In the middle of all this, the Mellanbys, or he’s Scottish. This is actually one other thing we talk about, Henry Mellanby is actually Harry May Mellanby. I might be getting his first name wrong, but it’s a married couple. His wife was working on the dental work, and he was working on the bones, and what they discovered was that oatmeal and dental cavities in children were aligned. If children ate a lot of oatmeal, they tended to get more cavities. And their bones tended to be weaker. They found a correlation in this. This is because now we know oatmeal doesn’t have vitamin D in it. And this became a world headline. There was a New York Times article about how the Scottish dominance of poetry was going to fail or something like that. There were all these very aggressive, like, and it’s a more subtle scientific story than this, ’cause there’s lots of things that don’t have vitamin D in it, and it’s not necessarily that they’re eating oatmeal. It’s that they’re only eating oatmeal. They’re not having oatmeal supplemented by milk or supplemented by butter, and those kinds of things. But this, Quaker Oats gets very concerned and Charles Minor comes to Steenbock and basically says we want to buy this from you. And that’s when Harry Russell and Charles Slichter noticed that, well now, this isn’t just a risk. We actually have an offer on the table for about a million dollars, and Quaker Oats can back this. We’re still not sure that the university wants to buy it, wants to go along with this, but we’re paying attention now because we think there’s some money involved here. Minor introduces Steenbock to this proposal, Hoskins-Wiles proposal. Steenbock basically says I’m not interested in selling this. This is not what Babcock would do. I’m not going to sell my science to a corporation. I did this to protect my state. I’m not here to make money. I’m not trying to sell out to the state. And Minor says, well there’s a guy down the street, another chemist who wrote this article, about promotion of scientific research. What they said is if the university is not very good at patenting, then we’ll get some friends at the university to do it. And they will manage the process. And they will make money, and then we’ll take the money and they’ll give it back to the university. So this is the idea that becomes WARF. Steenbock gets this. He takes it to Slichter and Russell. They go to the university, and they persuade the regents to allow the creation of WARF. Now an interesting thing here is I mentioned earlier that William Evjue believed that the university should only be funded by taxpayer dollars. There’s a regent named Daniel Brady, who is in the same political stripe, political ideology as that. He believes that along with Bob La Follette, that foundations like the Rockefellers and the Fords, we don’t want any Rockefeller money. That was their idea. We don’t want any Rockefeller money coming to universities. It’s going to corrupt university, so they pass a resolution called the Grady Resolution, which says the university will not accept any money from educational endowments or organizations of like character. They passed that, and then two weeks later Grady sponsors a resolution to create WARF, which is an educational endowment of like character. So one of the things that’s interesting about this story is that we can read that from our modern eyes and think that there’s a conflict here, that there’s a disagreement here, but what is actually happening is this is a loyalty study. This is a story about Wisconsin. It’s a different kind of story. So then the next sort of turn in the story, so WARF is created. Long story short, that’s only a couple chapters of my dissertation. I think we can talk about that next time. The first meeting of the board of trustees of WARF, they do three things. First thing is they say okay, we’re going to agree to take the patents that Steenbock has applied for. They agree to take the rights to them. We’ll agree to compensate Steenbock with some of the net royalties. That’s the first thing they passed. The second one is they authorize George Haight. That’s a bust of George Haight there on the left. You can tell he’s a very important person because they turned his head bronze.
(light laughter)
The Memorial Union actually created that, and we found it in the archives, and they let us have it. So the trustees say to George Haight,

we authorize you to go negotiate with Quaker Oats to give them the rights to use the process in their oatmeal. And then the third thing they do is they say we’re not going to allow Quaker Oats or any other licensee to irradiate fats. We’re not going to allow the irradiation of fats without the explicit approval of the University of Wisconsin. By fats they mean margarine, alternative to butter fat. And so they’re going to pay Steenbock, they’re going to go make a lot of money, and they’re going to make sure the margarine company doesn’t make any of that money. Now, on its face, what I just told you, going back to that manuscript I found from 1925, this is exactly what Steenbock wanted, this is exactly what he intended. He wanted to protect the dairy industry from the margarine industry. But a week after that meeting he writes George Haight this letter,

“As a worker attempting to get all adjusted on a logical basis, “I do not like the injection of bias by the foundation.” He’s basically telling Haight, I’m going to get paid for the alienation of an industry. I don’t like the ethics of this. I don’t like the way this looks. I know I agreed to it originally, but I’ve changed my mind. What he tells Haight is, I don’t want your money anymore.

You can keep your money, but what I want is control. I want veto power. This shouldn’t be the university having veto power. I want to be able to make sure that my scientific values are being fulfilled through WARF. And as I said, Haight’s the kind of guy who gets a bust in bronze made of him. He’s not a pushover. He basically handles Steenbock pretty deftly and WARF does what it’s going to do. He’s going to shovel Steenbock aside. And we know what happens is we end up Steenbock ends up becoming a millionaire by making a lot of money from WARF.

To read you how I wrapped this up in my dissertation, I thought I would just sort of read you the thesis statement from what I wrote. “So the story of Harry Steenbock and his patents could be told as a tragedy. The more he grasped how to control his science, the more that control slipped through his fingers. To paraphrase Karl Marx, this story could also be told as farce. The more Steenbock lost to scientific authority he desired, the more famous he became for his scientific accomplishments. The wealthier he became from his science, the more he was celebrated for turning down a fortune for the sake of science.

For that reason, unlike many traditional biographies, my dissertation does not evaluate the historical influence of a lone individual by chronicling the achievements of a great scientist. Unlike Charles Darwin, no one speaks of Steenbockism. Nor like Isaac Newton have we inherited Steenbock’s fundamental laws of vitamins. At any event, decades of scholarship and science and technology studies have proven that more than standing on the shoulders of giants, scientists practice their vocation within dense social networks that coproduce knowledge imbricated by cultural socionomic and natural systems of making and doing. That’s very technical terminology, but it’s a group enterprise, right? It’s a group enterprise. In the case of nutrition science, dozens of investigators have been given some sort of credit or could be given some form of credit for discovering vitamins or revolutionizing how humans understand them. In truth, they each contributed to configurations of knowledge and power that span continents and millennia. The same must be said of famous patent holders from Eli Whitney and Thomas Edison to IBM and Samsung. IBM and Samsung are the two leading patent– Most patents are granted to those. They’re the two highest ranked utility patents each year go to those two companies. We also must say the same thing about creators of nonprofit foundations from John D. Rockefeller to Bill and Melinda Gates. Had Steenbock been a different sort of person, had he been less stubborn, less prideful, less rooted in 19th century German American notions of individual initiative and moral uplift, he might have chosen a different path. He did not set out to create an industry, reform the academy, or innovate new strategies of scientific commercialization. A man dedicated to conservatism in almost every sense of that word, he sought to preserve what he perceived to be traditions of science and agriculture, not to change them. And he oriented himself within those traditions according to his own professional commitments. Acting from those values, he gave away the rights to his patent before he realized what the full implications would be. In the process, he managed to catalyze a new type of academic patenting institution. Steenbock’s loss of control as an inventor and his relative insignificance as a lone scientist are the very reasons he became the single most seminal individual in the history of academic patenting. He appears never to have fully comprehended the irony, but he lived it nonetheless. That’s it, so thank you.
(applause)