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You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Therac-25 Accidents. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length.
You will prepare and submit a term paper on The Therac-25 Accidents. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. The machine was involved in at least six accidents where the patients received an overdose of radiation despite the safety programming. The overdose was to the extent that some patients received doses a thousand times greater than the prescribed radiation doses resulting in serious injuries and even death. The machine was intended to be operated on two modes the, photon mode, a high-powered electron beam mode and the proton mode, a low-powered electron beam mode.
When the accidents occurred, the machine was supposed to be operating under the low beam mode but the high-powered mode got activated instead of striking the patients with an overdose of the radiation. The patients reported what felt like a shock, seeing a flashing light and hearing a buzzing sound. This indicated an overdose but the engineers insisted that the machine was incapable of delivering the unintended doses given its software safety programming. A few days later the patients showed symptoms of excess radiation exposure and three of the patients died as a result of the overdose while the other three sustained serious injuries leading to the loss of some of their body parts (Goans & Wald, 2014).
While these accidents were caused by errors in programming, various entities can be blamed for being either indirectly or directly involved in the negligence that resulted in these accidents. The AECL manufacturer who made the machine is one of the obvious people who are to blame. The manufacturer is reported to have assigned only a single software developer the task of creating the complex software that the machine would rely on for its functioning. Additionally, very little testing was done for the machine and the software specifications were never written down (Goans & Wald, 2014). Moreover, the manufacturer’s claims that the machine was free of defects even after complaints were made were baseless. The manufacturers ought to have taken the matter seriously and actively searched the source of the malfunction before approving the use of the machine. Apart from the manufacturers who are the obvious entities to take the blame, other parties .can also be identified who acted negligently in the whole matter.
