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| Home : Volume 32 : Winter 2006 | |
| Novel ideas: Patent attorney fills his life with new experiences | |
Jerry Battist |
Thanks to an insatiable curiosity about the world, Jerry Battist knows something about practically everything.
As a patent lawyer for 26 years for the Eastman Kodak Company, he literally spent his life ensuring he knew more than his potential competitors about whatever advance he was patenting. “When you work in patent law, you have to keep up with all the technology, and you learn a lot,” says Battist, who earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1962. “Wisconsin really teaches you how to think and how to learn.”
He grew up on a farm in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, excelled in chemistry in high school and, thanks to advice from a few people he calls very good mentors, enrolled as a chemical engineering student at UW-Madison. “Little did I realize that Wisconsin is probably one of the hardest engineering schools around — if I had known that, I might have freaked out,” jokes Battist.
Instead, he got involved and made lifelong friends who, in turn, shared their interests with him. He played tuba in the University of Wisconsin Band and joined the Chi Phi fraternity, where some of his activities included tennis (years later, he attained a 4.0 U.S. Tennis Association ranking) and water polo.
When he graduated, Battist joined Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, as a development engineer. Within a year, however, he enrolled in the American University Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C.
Battist's dream of becoming a patent lawyer started as a seed his friend, Fred Christians, planted back when the two were in high school, and Battist pursued it aggressively. “It turned out to be a good choice, because it broadens your horizons and teaches you how to think,” he says.
In 1966, Battist returned to Eastman Kodak — this time, as an attorney. He joined the company's patent law department, where his experiences ranged from corporate law, patent law and developing and managing patent and technology portfolios to developing businesses, managing business organizations, and finance and managing cash flow. “I ended up there as director of licensing and business technology,” he says. “That was a rather exciting thing, because we started up a lot of new companies at that time. I got into company startups, and also bringing in a lot of technology to the company.”
He combined his scientific, legal, patent and business background to effectively negotiate and structure business-technology relationships, research and development partnerships, product development and supply partnerships, and licensing agreements with U.S., Japanese and European entities in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, clinical diagnostics, and photography fields. “It's the best of both worlds,” he says, about patent law, “because you get to work with people at the peak of their career.”
Battist's career with Eastman Kodak ended in 1991 when the company offered him an enhanced early retirement package that was too good to pass up. “And so I decided I could make a living doing something else,” he says. “Being a Type A personality, I decided to take six months off, and got that done in a month.”
He joined Fuisz Technologies, a Virginia-based startup pharmaceutical company that, he says, had no products, little technology and lots of ideas. “Even the technology we had ended up not working, so pretty soon, I went back to the lab and used my old engineering work from Wisconsin,” says Battist. “We ended up becoming very successful making drug-delivery systems. And I ended up with over 25 patents in my own name.”
One of his discoveries was a method for putting a drug into a tablet that would quickly dissolve in a patient's mouth, thereby delivering medication without the patient having to swallow a pill. “Some of the inventions came out of some work that we did in the summer chem engineering lab, put together with other things,” says Battist. “And all of the pieces came together — things we had learned in that engineering summer program, with what we were striving to do.”
So 30 years after he earned his engineering degree, Battist first experienced the “aha” of engineering — the “rush” that inventors feel when they know they've made a research breakthrough. “And it's something that you go out and think, 'Boy, I'm on top of the world,' because it really is a breakthrough,” he says.
Battist left the company in 1995 — shortly before Canada pharmaceutical company Biovail acquired it. He then worked one day a week with the Alexandria, Virginia, law firm Parkhurst & Wendel until recently, when it merged with another firm. “So I'm not doing much of anything right now except having a lot of fun,” he says.
For fun, Battist and his wife, Louise, a systems engineer from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, charter sailboats and head to such exotic locales as the Greek Isles and the Caribbean. Their pastime evolved from Battist's early days in Wisconsin, when he sailed iceboats across frozen Rock Lake in his hometown, and later, in New York, where he volunteered to crew in a sailboat race on Lake Ontario. After that, he was hooked. He raced sailboats for more than 25 years, with a track record that included a win at the Canadian half-ton championships.
The couple owns a condo at the River Club in Telluride, Colorado, where they spend each February skiing and summers playing golf, a game the two recently learned when one of Battist's clients, Cleveland Golf, insisted they take it up.
They also enjoy traveling and have visited nearly every country in Europe, and Russia, Japan, New Zealand and Australia, among others. Traveling solo, says Battist, is much different from the corporate trips he used to take, where professional connections opened doors to experiences he might not otherwise have had. “But I found that you can also have fun on your own,” he says. “Again, you start to learn a lot of stuff — you read some books in preparation and when you get back, you read about what you should have seen.”
In Battist's case, you also record what you've learned in a comprehensive outline that attempts to make sense of the world. The outline is a result of one of Battist's latest interests: the use of biotechnology methods to study the evolution of DNA. “I've traced my ancestry all the way back to the primordial soup,” he says. “It's kind of intriguing when you get into this and what you find out. You get into the whole evolution of man and the way governments form and the way societies form and the way groups form: group dynamics. So you get into a lot of philosophy. I learned that by trying to study philosophy, I just couldn't make much sense out of it. But when you try to study philosophy from the biotech sense, and evolution, it all comes together.”
Also to track his evolution, Battist has researched his family's genealogy. Now, he's focusing on his five grandchildren and what he can learn from how they learn. “So you get into a lot of the development — how children develop, how they learn, the background of how their minds develop and begin to assimilate all of the information they have,” he says.
Naturally, he's taking lots of pictures of his grandkids, too, based on the photography training he received as an employee of Eastman Kodak, although he laments the advent of digital cameras and prefers his old “clunky” model. Battist displays some of his award-winning images (his favorite is “Reflections of a Black Swan”) on the website picture.com.
Although Battist is quick to credit his friends for exposing him to a variety of interests and viewpoints, as well as for providing the inspiration he needed to make it through the chemical engineering program, he cites good mentors — including Chemical and Biological Engineering Professors Emeritus Edwin Lightfoot, Charles Watson and Wayne Neill — as a strong reason for his professional success. “These people gave me a lot of confidence that I could go on and probably do anything I wanted to,” he says.
Content by perspective@engr.wisc.edu
Date last modified: 03-Feb-2006
Date created: 03-Feb-2006
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