A medical ethics group called this Thursday for an investigation into the death of a dozen monkeys in trials by the American company Neuralink, which is experimenting with brain implants. The magnate Elon Musk, founder of this biotechnology company, stated on September 10 that some animals died of terminal illnesses in the tests, but the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, has reported to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the primates died due to complications with the implant procedures. This Tuesday, the company announced that look for volunteers to test a brain chip in humans, with the approval of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Neuralink’s Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) project aims to allow people with tetraplegia due to cervical spinal cord injuries, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to control devices with their minds. external. Musk’s promise is to revolutionize prosthetics with an implant that allows human brains to communicate wirelessly with artificial devices, and even with each other. In 2021, Neuralink posted a video of a monkey playing a video game that copied the dynamics of ping-pong. In the video, with more than six million views, an animal named Pager controlled the controls with his eyes. The company had implanted two chips six months earlier. “First we trained him to play with a controller, but then we took it off and inserted the Neuralink,” Musk explained.
The company was founded in 2017 and began doing animal experiments after 12 months. A year ago, a Reuters investigation indicated that the company had slaughtered around 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys that suffered from high-suffering disorders before dying. But it was not until September 10 that Musk acknowledged the macaques’ deaths, although he denied that any of them were the result of a Neuralink implant. “We are extremely careful,” he stated in a company presentation. The group that has filed a complaint with the SEC claims that Musk’s comments about the animal deaths were “misleading, false” and that investors “deserve to hear the truth about the safety and marketability of Neuralink’s product.” The company has raised more than $280 million from outside investors.
From September 2017 to the end of 2020, the company’s experiments were assisted by staff at the National Primate Research Center in California. The American magazine Wired Has published an investigation in which he has brought together the records of the scientific center and the testimony of a former Neuralink employee. According to the documents, twelve of the primates used for the studies suffered from bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis and cerebral edema before dying.
Research Wired chronicles a battery of complications that developed after surgical implantation into the brains of monkeys. One of them, identified as “Animal 20” in veterinary records, would have scratched the operation wound, detaching part of the device. Researchers performed an intervention to fix the problem, but the infections took hold. He was euthanized on January 6, 2020.
The first human patient will soon receive a Neuralink device. This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement.
In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI risk civilizational risk reduction by improving human to AI (and human to human) bandwidth by… https://t.co/DzqoYI27Ng
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2023
“Animal 15” and “Animal 22” would also have died from the implant procedures. The female “Animal 15” pressed her head against the ground, as a probable sign of pain due to an infection. The vets were watching her. uncomfortable and pulling on her implant until she bled. She spent her last days lying down and holding hands with her cage mate. Yet another monkey, Animal 22, was euthanized in March 2020 after its cranial implant became loose. The autopsy states that “implant failure can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection.” The sources of Wiredwho asked to remain anonymous, maintain that they could not have died of natural causes and that they were kept in care for about a year before any surgery was performed: “It is difficult to imagine that these monkeys, which were not adults, were terminal for any reason.”
Now Neuralink is one step closer to placing implants in people and Elon Musk has celebrated it on social network (formerly Twitter): “In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in reducing the risk of artificial intelligence to civilization, improving the bandwidth from human to artificial intelligence (and from human to human) in several orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had this.”
You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, x and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
#group #doctors #denounces #death #dozen #monkeys #Elon #Musks #brain #chip #trials