Bill Wattenburg’s first reported entry in the public domain happened when he was a young assistant professor at Berkeley. The Director of the Alameda County Blood Bank, Dr. David Singman, a pathologist at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley, came to him in 1965 with a problem at the Alameda-Contra Costa Blood Bank that was costing a great deal of money and loss of life around the country. In the traditional way that blood banks distributed blood to local hospitals, up to twenty percent of the blood was being lost because of “outdating”. This spoilage occurred because the blood sat in refrigerators in the hospitals past the thirty-day limit during which it could be safely used somewhere else. Once a unit of blood was sent to a hospital, it was usually cross-matched and set aside for a particular patient. Even if the patient didn’t need it later, this particular unit of blood was seldom ever sent to another hospital before it became outdated and had to be thrown away.
Dr. Singman knew that Wattenburg was designing computers at U.C Berkeley at the time. He told Wattenburg about this problem and asked him if he could solve it.
On his own time, Wattenburg first designed a method to positively identify each pint of blood by a special code before it left the blood bank. He then designed a computer system to track each pint of blood as it went into hospital inventories. Frustrated with writing proposals and waiting for government money to buy the computer equipment he needed, Wattenburg convinced Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. in Sunnyvale to contribute time on one of their large defense computers during nighttime. Wattenburg had earlier helped design this computer for an Air Force project. He made a deal with Lockheed—He promised to show them how to save at least an hour of computer time a day on the Air Force project in return for the fifteen minutes at night he needed for the blood bank.
Next, he devised a scheme to hook up all hospitals and the Alameda Blood Bank to the Lockheed Sunnyvale central computer over telephone lines. This was ten years before remote data terminals for computers were commonly available.
Finally, he designed the computer programs that allowed the Alameda blood bank to keep track of every pint of blood in its inventory and sitting at the hospitals it served, His system allowed the blood bank to order all blood units approaching outdating at the hospitals to be located everyday and sent to other hospitals where they were needed instead of sending new units from the blood bank while the old units went to waste in hospital refrigerators.
His clever solution stopped the needless waste of ten percent of the blood supply in the Bay Area in the first year it was used. The average age of transfused blood was reduced by ten percent, and the need for outside donors was reduced by thirty-three percent. His system was quickly adopted by the Red Cross nationwide. The results were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), November 8, 1965, pp 583–586, “Computerized Blood Bank Control.” Wattenburg’s design was soon adopted by most blood banks throughout the country.
Dr. Singman has died, but we talked to a retired Red Cross medical advisor who knew Dr. Singman at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley when he was working with Wattenburg on this project. He remembers when all this happened twenty-five years ago. He says that some top Red Cross administrators were defensive and annoyed over the attention that Wattenburg’s innovation received in the press. “They were forced to admit that it was a great improvement and that they would use it as soon as possible, but they were uncomfortable because his idea and the JAMA article also brought public attention to the fact that large amounts of blood had been lost in the past because they had not recognized something that seemed so simple.” He said he remembers how he kicked himself when he saw it. He says that, for certain, hundreds of lives have been saved in the twenty-five years since then because desperately needed blood has been available were and when it is needed, and the cost of blood has been reduced significantly. He remembers that Wattenburg was invited to a blood bank association meeting in San Francisco shortly after the JAMA article appeared. Wattenburg announced that he was giving the rights to his idea to any blood bank that wanted to use it, free of charge. However, Lockheed built a substantial business supplying the computer programs and equipment to hundreds of blood banks around the country.
In one of our interviews with him, we showed Wattenburg the nice comments above and said that he must be very proud of what he had done at such an early age (29). He displayed some annoyance. He then told us that a U.C. Berkeley faculty promotions committee in 1966 concluded that this work for the nation’s blood banks was “more in the line of public service than university level scientific research worthy of promotion consideration.” He said that this disappointment was the second time that “this sort of thing happened to me, but I grew up after that.” He wouldn’t elaborate on what the first time was.
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