In the 1940's, World War II drove the development of new technology: the computing industry was born to solve issues with code breaking and munitions modelling.
In the 1950's, the Cold War drove the development of many things, including rockets (missiles) and aviation equipment.
In the 1960's, the Apollo program drove the development of even more new stuff: freeze dried ice cream, the Fisher Space Pen, and Velcro.
Today, Breast Cancer research is a major technology driver. Every week, I come across another article that talks about how some new breakthrough technology is being used to help fight Breast Cancer. Even military technology is being targeted at helping breast cancer detection.
And it's not limited to the US; Jon "maddog" Hall tells a story about a hospital in Sao Paulo that used a cluster of Sun Workstations many years ago to speed mammogram processing from over 24 hours to less than one hour. It had a direct impact in saving the lives of many women. Occasionally, some of the local indian women living around Sao Paulo would come into town when they were feeling ill. When mammograms took a day to process, many women would leave the hospital and not return. When mammogram processing was down to about an hour, it was easy to get them to stay until the processing was finished -- and rush them immediately to surgery when warranted.
