It’s been 6 years since Tesla and SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain control interface (BCI) startup Neuralink. At the moment, the company is developing a wireless brain chip, the testing of which should begin in the near future.
Twitter’s new CEO recently hosted a “Show and Tell” event where he talked about how brain chip interfaces could enable disabled patients to move and communicate again. The first two human applications targeted by the Neuralink device will be restoring vision and enabling muscle movement in humans, Musk said. Neuralink’s last public presentation over a year ago involved a monkey with a brain chip playing a computer game while thinking alone. And earlier in 2020, the device was implanted in pigs.
Neuralink has been conducting animal trials in recent years, seeking US regulatory approval to begin human clinical trials. According to Elon Musk, Neuralink could implant its chip into a human head within the next six months. Although previously human testing was supposed to start in 2020 and then pushed back to 2022. The company now plans to start a human experiment in 2023.
However, after testing the chip on monkeys, the animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a formal complaint with the USDA alleging that the monkeys suffered during the experiment as a result of inadequate animal care and highly invasive experimental implants. heads.
Business Insider wrote in February that of the 23 monkeys that have been experimented on since 2017, only seven survived in 2020. However, Neuralink stated that only eight were euthanized.
