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The accidents
The Therac-25 went into service in 1983. For several years and thousands of patients there were no problems. On June 3, 1985, a woman was being treated for breast cancer. She had been prescribed 200 Radiation Absorbed Dose (rad) in the form of a 10 MeV electron beam. The patient felt a tremendous heat when the machine powered up. It wasn’t known at the time, but she had been burned by somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 rad. The patient lived, but lost her left breast and the use of her left arm due to the radiation.
On July 26, a second patient was burned at The Ontario Cancer Foundation in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This patient died in November of that year. Autopsy ruled that the death was due to a particularly aggressive cervical cancer. Had she lived however, she would have needed a complete hip replacement to correct the damage caused by the Therac-25.
In December of 1985, a third woman was burned by a Therac-25 installed in Yakima, Washington. She developed a striped burn pattern on her hip which closely matched the beam blocking strips on the Therac-25. This patient lived, but eventually needed skin grafts to close the wounds caused by radiation burns.
On March 21, 1986, a patient in Tyler, Texas was scheduled to receive his 9th Therac-25 treatment. He was prescribed 180 rads to a small tumor on his back. When the machine turned on, he felt heat and pain, which was unexpected as radiation therapy is usually a painless process. The Therac-25 itself also started buzzing in an unusual way. The patient began to get up off the treatment table when he was hit by a second pulse of radiation. This time he did get up and began banging on the door for help. He received a massive overdose. He was hospitalized for radiation sickness, and died 5 months later.
On April 11th, 1986, a second accident occurred in Tyler, Texas. This time the patient was being treated for skin cancer on his ear. The same operator was running the machine as in the March 21st accident. When therapy started, the patient saw a bright light, and heard eggs frying. He said it felt like his face was on fire. The patient died three weeks later due to radiation burns on the right temporal lobe of his brain and brain stem.
The final overdose occurred much later, this time at Yakima Valley hospital in January, 1987. This patient later died due to his injuries.
https://hackaday.com/2015/10/26/killed-by-a-machine-the-therac-25/
