By 
Credit: Neuralink (Elon Musk’s)
Elon Musk’s brain chip company has clearly, and against all odds, implanted its inventory into a human — which is at least a little horrible, taking into account the fates went through by many of the monkeys on which it was experimented.
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, which he possess, the brazen billionaire said that the unspecified human subject was “healing well,” and that “early consequences reveal hopeful neuron spike observation.”
Keep that at it is — and until we look at some type of appraise critically evidence, or at least surety of life, we just have to take Elon Musk’s word for it — there’s been considerable dispute near by the brain-computer interface (BCI) company, along with the way it managed its primate test subjects.
Previous May, Neuralink declared on the Elon Musk-owned social network that it had been provided Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to test its implants on humans, and after a few month said the agency was letting it to start recruiting for subjects.
Amid those declarations, however, were some shocking and distorted reports about the fates that happen to some of the company’s animal test subjects.
In a September report that was issued just a day after Neuralink declared that it was recruiting for its human trials, Wired reported that as many as a dozen of the rhesus macaques the company tried upon suffered all type of freakish symptoms, along with brain swelling, partial paralysis, and self-harming behavior. In due course, many of the monkeys had to be put down.
Once in 2019 case, a chip that was being fixed into one of the macaques’s brains “broke off” while the procedure. After the monkey woke up from its botched surgery, it scratched at the place of the implant, made itself bleed, and gradually dislodged it. The wound, as it turned out, was infected, but because the implant blocked any treatment options, the macaque was putt to death.
Another 2019 experiment subject was observed pressing her head to the ground following implantation and picking at her surgery region until it began bleeding, after some time losing her coordination. She too was euthanized.
All told, about 21 percent of the company’s monkeys reportedly died because of brain implant problems.
It must be noted that these primates, which Neuralink obtained from the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis, were subjects early in the company’s history, with most of the experiments in question happening in 2019 and 2020.
However, data about the grisly details of those early trials seems not to have been shared with Neuralink’s investors.
As such, Securities and Exchange Commission were pressurized — a longtime foe of Elon Musk’s, which has viewed into different scandals at both Tesla and SpaceX — to find out whether the company and its notorious owner misled investors by hushing up the macabre macaque condition.
While it is still not clear whether the SEC has opened a probe into Neuralink or thinks to do so, it wouldn’t be the first time a federal agency has seemed into its testing practices.
In the late 2022, Reuters showed that the US Department of Agriculture had begun an inquiry into whether the firm violated the Animal Welfare Act. By July of 2023, however, the agency seemed to have closed its probe, saying that it didn’t get any evidence of animal research rule violations save for a 2019 incident that Neuralink itself reported.
In the world of experimental treatments and devices, unfortunately animal experiments mostly appear with a death toll. Where Neuralink allegedly went wrong was unable to disclose all of that upfront to the public before asking for money — and before recruiting willing Elon Musk stans to do harmful and risky brain surgery on them.
