William Otterson; Made San Diego a High-Tech Center

William W. “Bill” Otterson, a cyber-entrepreneur with the personality and humor of a glad-handing salesman who used his expertise and manner to develop San Diego’s high-technology industrial base, has died at the age of 69.

Otterson, the director of UC San Diego’s CONNECT business assistance program since its inception in 1986, died Nov. 24 in San Diego after a 19-year struggle with multiple myeloma.

The successful CONNECT program and Otterson’s very public battle with cancer capped his long career, which took him from Stanford engineering and MBA degrees, through the Air Force and 13 years with IBM, to heading his own magnetic tape drive producer, Cipher Data Products Inc., and then data processor Lexor Corp.

When the university decided to set up its model for bringing academic and community leaders together to encourage development of high-tech companies, Otterson had to be persuaded to join up. He later became the program’s biggest booster--networking, putting financiers together with entrepreneurs, planning conferences, battling government agencies, writing it all down in a folksy newsletter often spiced with items about his own travels and pursuit of good wine, good food, opera and Shakespeare.

“Bill was the single most important influence in encouraging our region’s growth in modern industries,” said UC Regent and software businessman Peter Preuss in a university statement. “All of San Diego has lost a great friend.”

Otterson’s program became an international model, emulated at UC Davis and in other countries, notably Sweden.

Under Otterson, the CONNECT program grew from a staff of two with 30 sponsors and a budget of $100,000 to a staff of 15 with more than 600 members and sponsors and a budget of $1.7 million. He formed a number of trade groups including the Biotechnology Industry Council, forerunner of BioCom.

Diagnosed in 1980 with multiple myeloma, which kills 80% of its victims within five years, Otterson launched into an enthusiastic onslaught against cancer--his own and everybody else’s. He was president and board member of the UC San Diego Cancer Center Foundation and a member of the Governor’s Cancer Research Council, and worked with biotech companies to develop new treatments.

He also participated in a controversial procedure himself--positive thinking, labeled an “unproven cancer treatment” by the American Cancer Society. Twice a day, Otterson told The Times in 1982, he sat quietly in his room, eyes closed, visualizing himself as a microscopic man patrolling his own bone marrow and gobbling up blurry gray cancer cells. Coached in the technique by a psychologist, Otterson also continued chemotherapy.

He lived with his cancer a remarkable 19 years, including his entire tenure with the CONNECT program. Some credited Otterson’s longevity to his dedication to CONNECT, his religious faith or even his natural sense of humor.

“So I get cancer and I say who is going to take care of my wife. Better get a dog,” he wrote for the 1993 annual report of Agouron Pharmaceuticals, one of many chemical companies seeking a cancer cure. “Well, the dog grows up, then the dog dies, but I don’t. And then we get a car and we say, ‘Boy, this is the last car we’re ever going to buy.’ So we finally shot the car! I drove it right into the ground.”

Otterson is survived by his wife of 38 years, Anne, and three children, John, Eric and Helen.

The family has requested that any memorial donations be made to the William Otterson Memorial Fund at the San Diego Foundation or the UC San Diego Cancer Center.