Mammograms don’t command much attention until the yearly appointment rolls around. My wife faces the hassle of the exam alone, of course, but we worry together until the results come back. Like any other cancer test—hello there, prostate—the technology leaves us feeling thankful but not exactly thrilled. It’s just one of those preventive-care indignities of middle age that have become routine.
So I was taken aback when a retired CIA officer I know recently told me a fascinating fact: Modern mammography was invented with help from American spies. Or, more precisely, by people who do the lab work for spies, technologists inside an intelligence agency so secret the U.S. government didn’t even admit it existed until 1992.
The surprising origin of computer-aided mammography is a particularly high-stakes example of how government tech spending has shaped private-sector businesses. In this case, it helped launch an $11-billion-a-year medical industry and changed the lives of millions of American families—with most of them never knowing about the connection with Uncle Sam.
Hunting for breakthroughs
The story begins in 1994, when a public health doctor at the Department of Health and Human Services, Susan Blumenthal, went hunting for breast cancer breakthroughs in Washington, D.C. The search was personal for Blumenthal, who’d lost her mother to breast cancer just before becoming a doctor.
