While the company’s ex-co-founder Max Hodak jumped ship to create a competitor who could pull the rug out from under himand although scientists continue to emit serious doubts about the feasibility of his brain implant projectElon Musk affirms it: Neuralink will test its human-machine interface, a chip directly plugged into the brainfrom 2022 on human beings.
However, we advise “early adopters” and chilled fans of the serial entrepreneur to wait a bit before registering on the waiting lists. According to an American animal welfare association, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), testing the thing on laboratory monkeys was responsible for “extreme suffering” for the poor guinea pigs.
In question, a subcontractor of Neuralink, the University of California at Davis, which has a laboratory specialized in testing on primates. Selon Business Insiderthe Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine obtained 700 pages of documents relating to tests on 23 primates, including veterinary reports or necropsies, post-mortem medical examination of a corpse.
The documents in question serve as the basis for a complaint filed in early February with the Department of Agriculture, the American body in charge of issues of respect for animal welfare. This refers to “extreme suffering resulting from inadequate animal treatment and the highly invasive nature of experimental brain implants during testing”.
Implant simple
The daily monitoring of the animals, which seems to be faulty, is particularly called into question, as is the attention paid to their pain and their stress, and the intermittent presence of a veterinarian intended to manage the anesthesia.
In the examples used by PCRM in its complaint, one of the monkeys tested by the UC Davis lab was missing fingers and toes, “possibly due to self-harm or other unspecified trauma”.
In short, the PCRM describes a veritable animal hell, which only 7 primates ultimately survived before being transferred to the Neuralink facilities, which cut ties with the university in 2020. Seven survivors out of 23 animals during a test campaign not being supposed to involve the death of the guinea pigs: there is reason to be shocked, and worried.
First @Neuralink product will enable someone with paralysis to use a smartphone with their mind faster than someone using thumbs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2021
Stimulating brains to treat dementia, cure Parkinson’s, restore feeling to anyone with a broken spine and then, in the future, create a «super-cognition»: you can’t make an omelette without torturing and destroying lives, the Neuralink teams might say to themselves.
In 2020, they already presented Gertrude, a sow with a Neuralink implant to monitor her brain activity. A year later in 2021, the start-up presented a monkey playing Pong by thought thanks to one of his brain chips: before being endowed with this power being perfectly useless to him, this one had perhaps lived through hell.