[dkulchenko]

Every time I read the story of Therac-25 I feel incredibly frustrated AECL never faced real consequences or (criminal) liability for it.

Maybe I'm retroactively imposing modern day safety culture, but reading the timeline and history, it feels like AECL was completely negligent in waving off the issue as more and more fatalities kept piling up.

Can't believe the devices weren't pulled offline to definitively solve the issue after the first death. Instead, they basically went "can't repro, oh well".

[favorited]

They should have faced consequences for their response, as much as for their error-prone device. Multiple patients had complained of extreme burns during their treatment, and autopsies later confirmed the cause of death to have been radiation exposure, yet AECL was still saying thing like, "damage could not have been produced by any malfunction of the Therac or by any operator error."

Sure, they were laying under our radiation cannon and then died of extreme radiation exposure, but they probably got it somewhere else.