Why Toyota Is Settling Its Sudden-Acceleration Cases

Mitch Trachtenberg @ Truthout - On April 11, 1986, a radiation technician at the East Texas Cancer Center in Tyler, Texas, set up to treat a skin cancer patient with the center's two-year-old Therac-25 medical linear accelerator. The machine had been used to successfully treat more than 500 center patients over two years. Similar machines, the Therac-6 and Therac-20, had been in use throughout the 1980s.

As Nancy Leveson and Clark Turner summarize in a 1993 issue of IEEE Computer, the radiation tech turned the beam on but the machine quickly shut itself down, making a loud noise and reporting "Malfunction 54." The patient told the technician and, later, the hospital's nuclear physicist, that it had felt like fire on the side of his face, he'd seen a flash of light, and heard a sound reminiscent of "frying eggs."  Read more.