"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"
""In my last year of medical school, it metastasized to her spine," Blumenthal told Fortune recently. "This beautiful, brilliant woman could no longer walk. Metastasis was such a brutal way to die. And so I vowed then and there that no other woman should have to suffer the way she did.""
Modern computer-aided mammography grew from advanced digital imaging techniques developed inside a highly secret U.S. intelligence agency. Government technology and spending enabled the transfer of that imaging expertise into civilian medical use, helping to create an $11-billion-per-year mammography industry and changing diagnostic practice for millions of families. Susan Blumenthal, an assistant Surgeon General motivated by her mother's death from metastatic breast cancer, sought breast-cancer breakthroughs and recognized the government's imaging capabilities. Routine mammography remains a common preventive-care practice even as its technological origins and government links stayed largely unknown to the public.
Read at Fortune
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