In recent days, Neuralink has begun seeking volunteers to begin clinical trials of the brain-computer interface. However, controversy has not been spared, with one group sending a letter to the SEC demanding an investigation into Musk's claims that no monkeys have died from the brain chip.
The nonprofit Physicans Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), in fact, has filed a complaint against Neuralink's behavior and in a letter published by WIRED called for an investigation into Musk for securities fraud due to a statement published in X on September 10, in which the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla claimed that "no monkeys have died as a result of Neuralink brain implants."
PCRM says the entrepreneur's claims are false. PCRM says it has obtained access to documents from the University of California, where the experiments were conducted, showing that at least a dozen monkeys implanted with the chips suffered serious health problems, including infections and brain swelling, before they were put down. Other side effects noted in the report include paralysis, seizures, problems or loss of coordination and balance, and depression.
According to PCRM, the surgery to implant the chip into the brain takes an hour and is done through two coin-sized holes in the head. One of the monkeys, a 6-year-old female rhesus macaque known as “Animal 15,” reportedly tried to remove the implant after the procedure, while others reportedly began to lose balance and coordination due to the “loss of pressure in the head.” In other cases, hallucinations were reported, with one monkey holding the hand and grooming its imaginary friend.
The group also disputed the claim that the monkey trials were conducted on animals that were “near death.” PCRM noted in the letter that “health records of the monkeys show that, although several animals suffered physical trauma and were used in experiments at UC Davis, there is no evidence that they were ‘near death,’ as Musk claimed,” since rhesus macaques often live to be about 25 years old in captivity, while the ages of the monkeys who died in the research were 7,25 years old. An anonymous former Neuralink employee also disputed Musk’s claim that the monkeys were near death.
Neuralink has yet to comment, and Musk tweeted that "the first human patient will soon receive a Neuralink device, which has the potential to restore full-body movement. In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in reducing the risk to civilization from AI by improving the bandwidth from human to AI (and human to human) by orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had this."
Recall that Neuralink received FDA approval for human trials a few months ago.
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