Neuralink: Chips In Human Brains, Trails To Begin Next Year

The project of Elon Musk’s company, which aims to manufacture and market brain chips, could take a new step in the coming months. Neuralink intends to put its computational brain implant in human patients within the next six months, the company announced on Wednesday, Bloomberg reports. “We are now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans,” Elon Musk confirmed in a tweet posted in the evening.

“The timing” of implementation “will depend on the FDA process”, the American Medicines Agency, continues the billionaire, who has just bought Twitter.

“We want to be very careful and sure that it will work before implanting a device in a human, but we have submitted most of our documents to the FDA and we should probably be able to download Neuralink in a human in about six months”, Elon Musk said at an event organized to present the progress of the project, explains Reuters.

At its last public event, more than a year ago, Neuralink featured a monkey, in whose brain a chip had been implanted, playing a video game using only its mind.

Control equipment remotely simply by thought

Neuralink is one of the multiple companies started by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. The SpaceX and Tesla boss quietly launched it in 2016, hoping to make brain implants. In practice, Neuralink must design brain-computer interfaces that would make it possible to control equipment remotely simply by thought.

The objective would be to restore mobility to paralyzed people by allowing them to interact with their environment or easily manipulate mechanical arms. Implants could also be a solution to neurological disorders, Neuralink promises.

An American animal rights association filed a complaint on February 10 against Neuralink for cases of sometimes fatal abuse of monkeys. She has, according to the Practitioners Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), performed experiments on at least 23 monkeys, between 2017 and 2020. Only 7 of them survived, according to information reported by Business Insider.

The PCRM mentions in its press release “extreme suffering, resulting from animal abuse and extremely invasive cranial implants during experiments”.