By Erik German

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.

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.

“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.” 

As an assistant Surgeon General, Blumenthal knew the U.S. government had some of the world’s most advanced digital imaging technology. But at the time, mammography was a 40-year-old procedure that remained stubbornly analog—with doctors peering at sheets of X-ray film through jeweler’s loupes. It seemed far from the state-of-the-art, computerized stuff Blumenthal kept hearing about from other parts of the federal government. As she told me, “We could see the surface of Mars, we can track missiles in outer space, why couldn’t we find small tumors right here on Earth?”

So Blumenthal called up the then-director of the Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey, and asked for help taking on a problem that was killing some 45,000 Americans per year. (The fact that as a federal public-health officer she technically held a military rank likely weighed in favor of the CIA director taking the call). 

Woolsey recalled the conversation in an oral history of the Clinton presidency: “Jim, this is a strange request,” he recalled Blumenthal saying, but could the intelligence community “be of any assistance in improving diagnosis of mammograms?’  

“It sounds kind of unlikely to me,” Woolsey told her, “but maybe not impossible.’”