In 1966, Bill Wattenburg and physicist Donald Glaser (winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1960, for the invention of the bubble chamber) formed a company called Berkeley Scientific Laboratories (BSL) which grew to a thirty-million dollar a year enterprise within three years. Wattenburg served as president of the company until 1970. The scientific staff at BSL directed by Wattenburg received major NASA contracts for work on the spacecraft guidance computer for the Apollo man-to-the-moon project and Department of Defense contracts for the computer systems for the Navy’s Poseidon missile. BSL later developed a number of very successful commercial products, including the first small medical data computer systems used in hospitals around the world to automate and improve medical testing procedures in clinical and radiology laboratories.
Berkeley Scientific Laboratories was purchased by Tracor, Inc., a high-technology conglomerate in Austin, Texas, in 1969. Wattenburg became a major stockholder in Tracor. He resigned as president of BSL and sold his substantial interests in Tracor in 1970. Tracor stock dropped considerably over the next few years. He later reinvested heavily in Tracor in 1975 shortly before it entered a long and profitable growth period over the following ten years under the leadership of president Frank McBee, a friend of Wattenburg’s. Wattenburg sold all his interests in Tracor again when the company was taken over by Admiral Bobby Inman in the eighties.
(The following comes from investment banker Faris Chesley, The Chicago Corporation, Chicago, who has known Bill Wattenburg since 1967.)
In 1969 Wattenburg and a group of physicians and medical specialists started a company in San Francisco called Comprehensive Health Services (CHS), later renamed Comprehensive Computer Systems, which developed health screening programs for professional groups such as the California Teachers Association and operated a large clinical laboratory in San Francisco. He joined the company as director of research in 1972 and developed another very successful product line of medical computer systems for radiology which was marketed worldwide by General Electric Co. CHS also acquired Bakte-Bennet Laboratories, a major supplier of growth media to hospitals and clinical laboratories on the west coast.
Wattenburg and his technical staff at CHS developed a unique system of “marked-sense” Medical documents that allow a radiologist to report his full diagnostic findings by simply marking a few spots on one of a series of special diagnostic reporting forms. We have attached one of these “Raport” forms to this report. General Electric Medical Systems division invested over eight million dollars in this development from 1972 to 1976.
The reader will find the following explanation much easier to understand by first examining the radiology report form and computer-generated radiology report attached.
The computer-readable forms they developed cover the full human anatomy with pictorial diagrams showing the areas of interest to a radiologist. Each color-code form also contains a set of symbols that describe almost all qualifying statements that a radiologist would normally dictate in a report of his examination of an X-ray film.
Wattenburg cautioned us that the original idea for all this came from Dr. Richard Mani, a young radiologist at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center who later worked with CHS. Several major computer companies and the U.C. computer center staff had told Dr. Mani that his idea was not workable.
Wattenburg and his staff worked for two years to build the computer hardware and special programs that could read the marked-sense documents and produce medical prose in the computer-generated diagnostic reports that would be both accurate and pleasing to radiologists.
General Electric sold hundreds of these small computer systems to major hospitals and radiology groups around the world from 1975 to 1980. The product line was sold to National Computer Systems, Minneapolis, in 1980.
National Computer Systems bought Comprehensive Computer Systems CHS) from Wattenburg and his group in 1979. National Computer Systems was the world’s biggest supplier of marked-sense computer equipment and technology. (They still were in 1990. NCS supplies most of the multiple choice forms and data processing for schools and educational testing services world wide.) Wattenburg became a major stockholder in National Computer Systems.
Wattenburg was doing talk radio on KGO and television shows on nights and weekends throughout this period from 1972 on.