Caltech's patents maven: Ed Ansell, patents and licensing director, brings together steaming R&D and hot entrepreneurs.

Legendary scientists have long roosted at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Jet-propulsion expert Theodore von Karman. Chemist Linus Pauling. Psychobiologist Roger Sperry. Even Frank Capra did time at Caltech, as a chemical-engineering student in 1918, before making movies.

Ground-breaking discoveries continue at the world-renowned research university, although identifying them quickly is a trick.

Edward O. Ansell is paid to know what's valuable at Caltech, and entrepreneurs have to go through him to get their hands on the faculty's snazzy inventions and brilliant patents.

Ansell is Caltech's director of patents and licensing, bringing together hot-out-of-the-oven technology and hungry entrepreneurs. Of course, that whole business is a bit unsavory to doctrinaire scholars who know that "pure" science should never be tailored to the needs of moneymen.

But the administration at Caltech, distinguished since the early 1920s in basic ("pure") and applied research, is beginning to market its patents more vigorously, and Ansell's job is to craft the deals.

"We're going to teach industry what we know," said Ansell, a modest and straight-talking Wisconsonite. It was perhaps the boldest statement he made during a three-hour interview.

Ansell is not a flashy guy or a braggart. The ex-U.S. government attorney and meatcutter's son drives a grey Toyota with 110,000 miles on it and works out of a rather ordinary office at the university. But at his fingertips are all the sparks and magic of the scientific minds whirring at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. He seems to carry the responsibility calmly.

This month, Caltech established a program to actively seek business people to exploit the discoveries made at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. JPL is NASA's celebrated space center operated by the university in Pasadena. JPL Engineers will search for potential licensees for several technologies, including electron-beam microscopy and for "parallel processing" equipment, a string of microprocessors that amounts to a poor man's supercomputer.

"If it works there, then it may spread to the Caltech campus," said Ansell, who will have little to do with marketing. An intellectual-property attorney by training, he will draw up contracts and also dicker over prices. Word is out on the program, and new interest in JPL inventions is already gaining steam, he says.

"I got a call from a large electronics company . . . they said, 'You're a year ahead of us and we want to catch up,'" Ansell says. In the past, most marriages ensue after private industry discovers in a technical journal that Caltech has a patent it wants. Now the university wants to head in the direction of MIT and Stanford University, which aggressively shop their patents.

Caltech has provided licenses to scores of companies. For instance, Santa Fe Springs-based Arias Research Associates hopes to revolutionize electric cars with its high energy-density "starved electrolyte" bipolar battery, and the Getty Conservation Institute in Marina del Rey is using Caltech's thermal technology to get fine art objects to repel dust, preserving their attributes.

According to businessman who have sat across the table from him, Ansell's most notable trait is straightforwardness.

"He was fair, forthright, and we spent minimal time on jockeying for position," says Neil Diver, founder and the original president of Exogene Corp. That Monrovia firm swapped stock for the license to a Caltech method for using hemoglobin genes to enhance production of antibiotics and other pharmaceutical products. Diver says those shares are worth more than triple their value when the deal was done in 1987.

"He's not a person that's busy trying to hide the ball," comments Joseph H. Smith, licensing vice president at Applied Biosystems Inc., of Foster City, which pays a 4 percent royalty on its DNA sequencers. The machines, which retail for $120,000 on average, analyze DNA quicker and more accurately using fluorescent means (rather than radioactive).

"I think he protects the interests of Caltech very effectively," says current Exogene President Jack Wood, who renegotiated the gene license. "At the same time he understands it has to be a win-win situation," benefiting business, too.

Ansell estimates he brokers about two dozen license deals a year for Caltech and its rocket-and-space lab, JPL. He quickly reminds you he had nothing to do with dBASE, the world's best-selling database software program, which was derived from a highly innovative database program created by JPL computer scientists.

The space center, funded by the federal government, put the program into the public domain. That permitted a Martin-Marietta Corp. engineer named Wayne Ratliff, invited to tinker with a JPL mainframe computer running the program, to carve out a portion of it for himself. He named it Vulcan and sold the rights to George Tate, founder of Torrance-based Ashton-Tate Corp., who renamed it dBASE and built it into a $200 million-a-year-plus product in the 1980s.

"All I can say is, it didn't happen under my watch!" says Ansell without blaming either his predecessor or the taxpayer-funded space center, which was not bound to release its program for free. "Today the thinking is to raise 'barriers to entry' (i.e. exclusive licenses) to attract investment capital to get government technology exploited."

During high school he took a part-time job as a radio-telephone operator, hooking ships to shore over phone lines. Then, with an electrical engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin, he found work with the Federal Communications Commission in Buffalo investigating bootleg radio stations. Transferred to Washington, D.C., he examined TV applications and radio-signal interference flaps.

But he wanted a wife and family, hard to support on government pay. Also, "I wasn't a great engineer." So he started studying law -- a more lucrative career -- at night at George Washington University. RCA hired Ansell out of college and trained him in patent work, which has become his calling.

Today he earns Caltech about $1 million a year in royalties, up from barely $200,000 when he came on board. Only $1 mil?

"I gotta be honest: We're not a knockout." But that doesn't mean Caltech's intellectual warehouse is depleted. Instead, it reflects priorities.

"We're not going to give something away, but collecting royalties and making gobs of money is secondary." The primary goal is to put technology into the hands which will put it to the greatest public benefit. That's Caltech's policy and I agree with it."

Several policies have loosened up in recent years, says Ansell, to the benefit of industry. President Thomas E. Everhart, who took the top administrative post in 1987, "is more attuned to the needs of industry," Ansell says.

There used to be a "strict" policy barring companies that sponsored research from reviewing papers before they were submitted for publication. Companies wanted to be sure every stroke of genius they paid for was patented (to which they then had a right) before the public reads it.

That policy is undergoing review now, he said. Also Caltech was formerly reluctant to accept funding from a business on condition that it be granted exclusive licenses to the fruits of the research. "But we're much more liberal now. . . . The attitude changes as the administration changes."

"Caltech was totally non-aggressive until the last 10 years," says private patent attorney Joseph E. Mueth, who today files Caltech patents with the U.S. Patent Office on contract to the university. Meuth says Ansell's "diplomatic" demeanor works successfully with scientists who can be, well, fastidious.

Ansell was recruited by the university in 1982 from his former private-industry job with rocket-engine maker Aerojet General Corp. He began there as its No. 2 patent lawyer in 1958 and rose to No. 1, but added the corporate secretary and associate general counsel posts, too.

That diluted his patent work and he got restless. "I was just signing papers, getting to be an expert on Aerojet and its divestiture work," he recalls. Then early 1980s, the Bayh-Dole Act spurred university-industry license deals by allowing universities (as well as non-profits and small businesses) to own title to inventions made under government sponsorship. Ansell's eyes turned to academia. "It was an opportunity to get in on the ground floor."

So he left Titan-missile engines for spacecraft at JPL, one of several fairly smooth career transitions for the native of Superior, a town of 30,000 at the icy western fingertip of Northern Wisconsin. That iron-ore export city was where Ansell's father, an immigrant from Poland, settled with his mother, a legal secretary and daughter of Lithuanian parents.

Ansell, who has a bad hip from infancy and limps a bit, dove into a ham radio hobby as a teenager. "I suppose I was one of these 'nerds' who built radios and transmitters . . ." he says.

Yet, Ansell easily admits, some businesses try to "chisel us down" and sometimes a low-price deal is struck. A Minneapolis entrepreneur with no prior sales licensed a Caltech heat-sink device to put into thermal-electric equipment he had never built. He paid a $2,000 advance against royalties, to start, cutting a little slack.

"Normally, I would want a good sized down payment because if we don't get $10,000, they're not serious," says Ansell. Next the company must pay $15,000 in the second year, and $10,000 minimum each year afterward. "But I don't encourage that sort of thing," he adds.

Ansell talks money terms in the deadcalm and non-defensive way a poker player must draw to three aces without his hand shaking. Confidence comes from knowing value better than the other guy.

When push comes to shove, "I follow the administration," he says. Adding with a grin, "I'm a hired hand here."

SNAPSHOT

Edward O. Ansell

Native of: Superior, Wisconsin

Current residence: Claremont

Age: 66

Education: B.S. in electrical engineering, University of Wisconsin, 1948; J.D. from George Washington University, 1955