Company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device after getting green light from independent review board
Elon Musk’s brain-implant startup, Neuralink, said it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting patients for its first human trial. The company is seeking people with paralysis to test its experimental device in a six-year study.
Neuralink is one of several companies developing a brain-computer interface (BCI) that can collect and analyze brain signals. But its billionaire executive’s bombastic promotion of the company, including promises to develop an all-encompassing brain computer to help humans keep up with artificial intelligence, has attracted skepticism and raised ethical concerns among neuroscientists and other experts.
Last year, the Food and Drug Administration denied the company’s request to fast-track human trials, but in May approved Neuralink for an investigational device exemption (IDE) that allows a device to be used for clinical studies. The agency has not disclosed how its initial concerns were resolved.
Personally, I think I’ll be avoiding anything that starts with “Elon Musk’s…”
Yeah, I certainly won’t use any product associated with that muskrat.
Things would have to seismically change in the tech/business world for me to trust any company enough to put something in my brain. That said, if I was forced to buy one the last two I would consider letting near my brain are Musk and Zuck
Personally, I think I’ll be avoiding any device that can control my brain directly and has internet access, regardless of the owner.
This is the one he cooked all those monkey brains for? Pass.
1,500 animals died, including 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys. Sounds really reliable.
i mean its likely not reliable but i bet some animal deaths are inevitable when developing a new implant. 1500 sounds way too high though.
He ignored his employees saying that the device wasn’t ready and forced them to try it on the animals
ah didnt know that, yep thats awful
Come on fans. This is your moment to shine and show us just how much you believe in his bullshit.
Don’t you want to live like it’s Cyberpunk 2077? Now’s your chance!
Perhaps like one of the vegetables from 2077?
That fuck will sell ad space on the fucking thing and all you’ll get is Kanyes voice in your head chanting: “Elon macht frei” 24/7.
You can totally trust the guy who ran the biggest social media company into the ground within less than a year to surgically implant you with a device that has a 21% fatality rate.
Hey anonymous dumb enough to sign up kinda deserves it imo.
Desperate enough.
Musk: “Scumbags of the world are welcome on my platforms!”
Also Musk: “Let me put this device in your brain.”
It’ll never get into testing…
Everyone that would volunteer, doesn’t have a place for the implant to go
i would say i don’t get it for the low hanging fruit troll, but fuck that. they really are just that stupid
I’d feel bad if this was the only option for those who are paralyzed, but it’s not.
The tech has existed for decades. Musk is just trying to shrink it so it’s less noticable, he’s just doing it before the tech is ready
Where’s this independent review board so we can strip them of all authority? The crimes and abuses this project has committed against animal subjects should have gotten it shut down a long time ago and the PI brought up on animal cruelty charges. I do not envy the neurosurgeons and trauma surgeons who are going to have to try to save any of the human participants.
Do you have any more info about the crimes/abuses you mentioned? Interested to read on it
There have been some news pieces put out, but most importantly
… the Physicians Committee (PCRM) said records it obtained for the 23 monkeys used in the experiments reflect a “pattern of extreme suffering and staff negligence.” The committee said that the letter to the USDA is based on nearly 600 pages of what it calls “disturbing” documents released after the committee filed an initial public records lawsuit in 2021.
Now, CNN did link to Nueralink’s site, but not to PCRM. That, to me, says a lot about who you they’re supporting.
If you want to read PCRMs report, it’s here. Because reading the sources is always a good idea.
A couple of excerpts here:
The first complaints about the company’s testing involved its initial partnership with University of California, Davis, to conduct the experiments. In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings. The group alleged that surgeons used the wrong surgical glue twice, which led to two monkeys suffering and ultimately dying, while other monkeys had different complications from the implants.A note about Musk’s use of propaganda in the face of truth (emphasis mine):
Neuralink executives have said publicly that the company tests animals only when it has exhausted other research options, but documents and company messages suggest otherwise. During a Nov. 30 presentation the company broadcast on YouTube, for example, Musk said surgeries were used at a later stage of the process to confirm that the device works rather than to test early hypotheses. “We’re extremely careful,” he said, to make sure that testing is “confirmatory, not exploratory,” using animal testing as a last resort after trying other methods.In October, a month before Musk’s comments, Autumn Sorrells, the head of animal care, ordered employees to scrub "exploration" from study titles retroactively and stop using it in the future.There’s lots more in there and I highly recommend reading the whole article. It is from December of last year, but I’d find it hard to believe that things would have improved in the past 9 or 10 months…certainly not enough to excuse the shoddy work and unnecessary suffering caused early on in the project.
https://www.pcrm.org/ethical-science/animals-in-medical-research/pcrm-response-neuralink-claims
From the article posted in anothers comment:
Animal 11”: They were killed in a terminal procedure at UC Davis on March 15, 2019. Prior to this procedure, the monkey had a cranial implant surgically placed inside their brain on Dec. 3, 2018. Following this procedure, the implant became chronically infected. The monkey began to have a depressed appetite.
October 2018, UC Davis staff noted that the monkey was “missing multiple digits [on] both hands, [right] foot,” possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma.
On Dec. 18, 2018, staff decided to “prophylactically or conservatively start [antibiotic treatment]” for the monkey after observing that “the skin was eroded” surrounding the implant. In the following two months, there are frequent observations of the monkey having a bloody, infected head wound from the device experimenters attached to their skull. The monkey was prescribed several types of antibiotics during this period. In January 2019, staff observed that the monkey had a “bloody head…dried blood around base at cranial implant.”
If people haven’t figured out how to mitigate rejection of implants to at least 99% they shouldn’t even be attempting this kind of nonsense.
I wonder if he’ll later say he only implanted people who were already dying with the devices.
As opposed to the rest of us who are not dying.
I had forgotten about this until you mentioned it…
I just found it stupid that he said only those who were dying were tested on… Everyone’s dying, that’s a shit excuse.
Calm down Sylvia Plath. You know what he meant.
How long before Musk decides to charge per thought?
For $8, you get to be able to have basic motor function. For $10 a month, you get the rudiments of speech. For $15 a month, otherwise known as Neuralink Blue, you get free speech (free speech limited to what Elon approves of you saying).
He’s hoping to make your life pay to win.
It’s already pay to win. They’re trying to make it pay to live.
And Elon is going first right… right?
Actually… you might be on to something here. He may already have gone. Might explain the erratic behavior. The dumb shit he says and does looks an awful lot like brain damage 🤔
I can’t wait to have ads in my dreams /s
nightmare mode is free. upgrade to sweet dreams only $49.99 per night.
Lightspeed Briefs™
If you put any shit from this man in your head, you deserve what happens to you.
On the bright side, there will be a few less musk fans around after they are lobotomised.
Ooof. Well played.
Did they run out of monkeys?
No, anyone who signs up for this is one.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink approved to recruit
foolshumans for brain-implant trialInterfacing with the brain is easy, we’ve been doing it for decades. Let me know when we can leave an implant in for a decade without it turning into a scar tissue tumor.
Although hopefully I’ll have died of old age before that happens. Being able to plug in people is the basis of more dystopian nightmares than I can count, and I have zero confidence in our species ability to prevent those horrors from being reality.
