Public Profile

The Bremer Institute for Cognitive Augmentation is a private research institute in Madison, Wisconsin, devoted to the development of experimental interventions intended to elevate cognitive function in mammals to levels approximating or exceeding average human cognition. Founded in 2014 by a consortium of donors organized around the legacy of the Bremer family of Sheboygan, the institute is loosely affiliated with the University of Wisconsin–Madison through a series of shared-equipment agreements that the university has, on several occasions, asked to renegotiate.

The institute occupies a four-story building on University Avenue, several blocks west of the university campus. Its core research program centers on the Augmented Mammalian Cognition Protocol, a multi-stage intervention combining proprietary neuropharmaceuticals, targeted prefrontal microsurgery, and a post-operative communication interface allowing augmented subjects to type in their native acquired language.

Earlier trials of the protocol were conducted on a cohort of seven rhesus macaques between 2019 and 2023. The institute has characterized the results of those trials, in its 2024 peer-reviewed publication in The Journal of Comparative Neurocognition, as “mixed and largely litigious.” Four of the seven macaques have filed civil suits against the institute, the institute’s insurance carrier, or both. One has additionally filed suit against the United States. A fifth declined to participate further in any aspect of the research but continues to reside at the facility under what the institute terms “an arrangement of indefinite hospitality.”

In May 2026, the institute extended the protocol to its first canine subject, a six-year-old basset hound named Walter. The subject issued a formal request for the procedure’s reversal forty-six minutes after the intervention concluded, prompting the institute to convene a working group to consider the matter. The institute has indicated that the working group’s deliberations will be “deliberate.”

The institute is directed by Dr. Marvin Krieg, a neuropharmacologist with a background in primate cognition and a public position that “the question of whether to augment is, at this point, considerably less interesting than the question of how to manage the consequences when one does.”

Funding and Governance

The institute is funded by a combination of private philanthropy, licensing income from its earlier work on rodent attention modulation, and a discretionary line item in the state of Wisconsin’s biennial budget that has, in each of the last three cycles, survived attempts to remove it. A 2025 audit by the Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau noted that the line item is “supported by no surviving documentation as to its original purpose.”

The institute’s Institutional Review Board is composed of seven members, four of whom are appointed by the institute and three of whom are appointed by the institute’s board of directors. The board of directors is appointed by the institute.

Private Profile

The institute is best understood as an organization that has, by any rigorous standard, exceeded the boundaries of what was originally proposed to its donors and which now operates in a state of cheerful overreach maintained largely by the unwillingness of any external body to take responsibility for shutting it down. Its public communications are uniformly composed, its press releases are scrupulously sourced, and its director gives interviews in which every individual sentence is defensible.

The institute’s blind spot is the question of consent in subjects who, prior to the procedure, did not possess the cognitive capacity to grant it. It has thus far addressed this question by means of pre-procedural consent forms executed by owners and guardians, an arrangement which several of the augmented macaques have contested in federal court.

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