"Captain Kirk Forgot to put the Machine on Stun"
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 July 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lying on the cold metal table, Voyne Ray Cox knew the drill. This was his ninth round of cancer treatment - which is why he was certain that what happened next couldn't be right. He heard a sizzling sound and saw a blue flash. And then - agony. It was like someone had thrust a hot skewer through his shoulder. He cried out in pain, but the operator was down the corridor and she couldn't hear him. She blasted him again and again with the red-hot radiation beam.
Ray wasn't the first patient to be burned by the Therac-25 therapy machine, and he wouldn't be the last. Its dual-purpose design, controlled by a software programme, was supposed to offer hospitals more bang for their buck. But as patient after patient suffered ulcerated skin and yawning lesions, it should have been clear that something was horribly wrong. Why did it take so long for anyone to put this awful puzzle together?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:04.2 | Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. |
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| 0:07.5 | More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. |
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| 0:15.7 | Learn how podcasting can help your business. |
| 0:17.4 | Call 844-844-I-Hart. |
| 0:26.5 | Thank you. can help your business. Call 844-844-Eyheart. Pushkin. |
| 0:35.2 | Nobody really wants to be deliberately bombarded with radiation. |
| 0:40.7 | But if you have cancer, radiation therapy might just save your life. |
| 0:50.5 | That must have been what a young man called Voine Ray Cox hoped as he made visit after visit to the East Texas Cancer Centre. |
| 0:59.2 | Just 33 years old, Ray, to his friends, was young to be a cancer survivor. He had a tumour cut out of his shoulder, and now, March 1986, he was there for his ninth session of |
| 1:07.3 | radiation therapy, designed to ensure that no traces of the cancer remained. |
| 1:13.6 | Despite his bad luck, Ray was a cheerful, resilient man. |
| 1:18.6 | He knew the drill. |
| 1:20.6 | Press his bare chest and stomach onto the cold metal treatment table, |
| 1:25.6 | chapped to the operator while she manoeuvred him into position |
| 1:29.0 | underneath the looming bulk of the Therac-25 radiation therapy machine. |
| 1:37.0 | The operator knew the drill too. In his account of the case, the ergonomics expert Stephen Casey calls her Mary Beth, |
| 1:47.6 | although that's not her real name. |
| 1:51.0 | We'll do the same. |
| 1:53.4 | Mary Beth cheerfully caught up with Ray as she used a console control to precisely position him |
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