Neuralink logo displayed on a phone screen, a silhouette of a paper in shape of a human face and a binary code displayed on a screen are seen on this multiple exposure illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on December 10, 2021.
Jakub Porzycki | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Elon Musk’s health tech enterprise Neuralink shared updates to its brain-implant technology during a “show and tell” recruitment event Wednesday night. Musk said in the course of the event that he plans to get one in every of the implants himself.
Musk said two of the corporate’s applications will aim to revive vision, even for individuals who were born blind, and a 3rd application will concentrate on the motor cortex, restoring “full body functionality” for individuals with severed spinal cords. “We’re confident there aren’t any physical limitations to restoring full body functionality,” Musk said.
Neuralink could begin to check the motor cortex technology in humans in as soon as six months, Musk said.
“Obviously, we would like to be extremely careful and certain that it would work well before putting a tool in a human, but we’re submitted, I feel, most of our paperwork to the FDA,” he said.
Musk also said he plans to get one himself. “You can have a Neuralink device implanted without delay and you would not even know. I mean, hypothetically … Actually, in one in every of these demos, I’ll,” he said. He reiterated that on Twitter after the event.
Since none of Neuralink’s devices have been tested on humans or approved by the FDA, Wednesday’s announcements warrant skepticism, said Xing Chen, assistant professor within the Department of Ophthalmology on the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“Neuralink is an organization [that] doesn’t need to answer to shareholders,” she told CNBC. “I do not understand how much oversight is involved, but I feel it is very vital for the general public to all the time take into accout that before anything has been approved by the FDA, or any governmental regulatory body, all claims must be very, very skeptically examined.”
Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Musk and a bunch of other scientists and engineers. It strives to develop brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, that connect the human brain to computers that may decipher neural signals.
Musk invested tens of thousands and thousands of his personal wealth into the corporate and has said, without evidence, that Neuralink’s devices could enable “superhuman cognition,” enable paralyzed people to operate smartphones or robotic limbs with their minds someday, and “solve” autism and schizophrenia.
The corporate’s presentation Wednesday echoed these lofty ambitions, as Musk claimed that “as miraculous as it might sound, we’re confident that it is feasible to revive full body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord.”
Musk showed footage of a monkey with a pc chip in its skull playing “telepathic video games,” which Neuralink first debuted over a yr ago. The billionaire, who can be the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and the brand new owner of Twitter, said on the time that he desires to implant Neuralink chips into quadriplegics who’ve brain or spinal injuries in order that they’ll “control a pc mouse, or their phone, or really any device just by considering.”
Neuralink has come under fire for its alleged treatment of monkeys, and the Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine on Wednesday called on Musk to release details about experiments on monkeys that had resulted in internal bleeding, paralysis, chronic infections, seizures, declining psychological health and death.
Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison
Neuralink’s flashy presentations are unusual for firms within the medical devices space, said Anna Wexler, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy on the Perelman School of Medicine on the University of Pennsylvania. She said it’s dangerous to encourage individuals who have serious disabilities to get their hopes up, especially in the event that they could possibly incur injuries because the technology is implanted during surgery.
Wexler encouraged people to placed on their “skeptic hat” about Neuralink’s big claims.
“From an ethical perspective, I feel that hype may be very concerning,” she said. “Space or Twitter, that is one thing, but whenever you come into the medical context, the stakes are higher.”
Chen, who makes a speciality of BCIs, said Neuralink’s implants would require subjects to undergo a really invasive procedure. Doctors would wish to create a hole within the skull with a purpose to insert the device into the brain tissue.
Even so, she thinks some people could be willing to take the chance.
“There’s quite a couple of disorders, reminiscent of epilepsy, Parkinson’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder, by which people have received brain implants and the disorders have been treated quite successfully, allowing them to have an improved quality of life,” Chen said. “So I do feel that there’s a precedent for doing this.”
Wexler said she believes the choice would ultimately come right down to a person patient’s personal risk-benefit calculation.
Neuralink will not be the one company attempting to innovate using BCIs, and plenty of have made big strides lately. Blackrock Neurotech is heading in the right direction to bring a BCI system to market next yr, which might make it the primary commercially available BCI in history. Synchron received FDA approval in 2021 to start a clinical trial for a permanently implanted BCI, and Paradromics is reportedly gearing up to start in-human testing in 2023.