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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "+//ISBN 0-9673008-1-9//DTD OEB 1.0 Document//EN"
+  "http://openebook.org/dtds/oeb-1.0/oebdoc1.dtd">
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/x-oeb1-document; charset=utf-8" />
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+<title>Bill Wattenburg’s Background: Blood Banks</title>
+</head>
+
+<body>
+
+<h1>Blood Banks</h1>
+
+<p>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+particular unit of blood was seldom ever sent to another hospital before it became outdated and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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &amp; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><b>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.</b></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
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