• July 20 –
Allen Hill and colleagues at the
University of Oxford develop a glucose biosensor. • September 9 –
George Brownlee and colleagues at the University of Oxford publish their results of cloning human clotting factor IX. • November –
Helen House, the world’s first
children’s hospice, is set up by
Sister Frances Dominica in
Oxford, England. • December 2 – At the
University of Utah, 61-year-old retired dentist
Barney Clark becomes the first person to receive a permanent
artificial heart; he lives for 112 days with the device. •
Janet Balaskas establishes and names the active birth movement. •
Working Formulation adopted as a standard classification for
non-Hodgkin lymphomas. • The
Therac-25, a computerised model of
radiotherapy device for cancer treatment, enters production. Design faults, including
race conditionss and poor error documentation in its software, and lack of hardware interlocks, lead to six reported incidents of Therac-25 units administering excessive radiation doses, injuring patients and causing multiple deaths. ==Physics ==