This story was originally published by ProPublica.
In early February 2016, the security gate at a U.S. military base near Washington, D.C., swung open to admit a Navy doctor accompanying a pair of surprising visitors: two artificial intelligence scientists from Google.
In a cavernous, temperature-controlled warehouse at the Joint Pathology Center, they stood amid stacks holding the crown jewels of the center’s collection: tens of millions of pathology slides containing slivers of skin, tumor biopsies and slices of organs from armed service members and veterans.
Standing with their Navy sponsor behind them, the Google scientists posed for a photograph, beaming.
Mostly unknown to the public, the trove and the staff who study it have long been regarded in pathology circles as vital national resources: Scientists used a dead soldier’s specimen that was archived here to perform the first genetic sequencing of the 1918 Flu.
Google had a confidential plan to turn the collection of slides into an immense archive that — with the help of the company’s burgeoning, and potentially profitable, AI business — could help create tools to aid the diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other diseases. And it would seek first, exclusive dibs to do so.
“The chief concern,” Google’s liaison in the military warned the leaders of the repository, “is keeping this out of the press.”
More than six years later, Google is still labouring to turn this vast collection of human specimens into digital gold.
At least a dozen Defense Department staff members have raised ethical or legal concerns about Google’s quest for service members’ medical data and about the behaviour of its military supporters, records reviewed by ProPublica show. Underlying their complaints are concerns about privacy, favouritism and the private use of a sensitive government resource in a time when AI in health care shows both great promise and risk. And some of them worried that Google was upending the center’s own pilot project to digitize its collection for future AI use.
Pathology experts familiar with the collection say the center’s leaders have good reason to be cautious about partnerships with AI companies. “Well designed, correctly validated and ethically implemented [health algorithms] could be game-changing things,” said Dr. Monica E. de Baca, chair of the College of American Pathologists’ Council on Informatics and Pathology Innovation. “But until we figure out how to do that well, I’m worried that — knowingly or unknowingly — there will be an awful lot of snake oil sold.”
When it wasn’t chosen to take part in JPC’s pilot project, Google pulled levers in the upper reaches of the Pentagon and in Congress. This year, after lobbying by Google, staff on the House Armed Services Committee quietly inserted language into a report accompanying the Defense Authorization Act that raises doubts about the pathology center’s modernization efforts while providing a path for the tech giant to land future AI work with the center.
