Medical ethics organization lodges complaint over monkey deaths in Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip trials

A medical ethics group has called for an investigation into the deaths of a dozen monkeys used in tests by Elon Musk’s biotech firm Neuralink, which is experimenting with brain implants. Musk, the founder of the company, claimed on September 10 that some animals had died of terminal illnesses during the tests, but the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington-based nonprofit organization, on Thursday lodged a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the primates died from complications stemming from the implant procedures. Last Tuesday, Neuralink announced that it is seeking volunteers to test a brain chip in humans, with clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Neuralink’s Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface (PRIME) project aims to enable people with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients, to control external devices with their minds. Musk’s promise is to revolutionize prosthetics with an implant that allows human brains to communicate wirelessly with artificial devices, and even with each other. In 2021, Neuralink released a video of a monkey playing Pong, the Atari console video game based on the dynamics of ping-pong. In the video a macaque named Pager manipulated the controls with his eyes. The company had implanted two chips in the animal six months earlier First, Pager was taught to play the game with a joystick, and then, according to Musk, the device was removed and the Neuralink inserted.

Neuralink was founded in 2017 and began animal experiments 12 months later. Last year, a Reuters investigation indicated that the company had slaughtered around 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, which suffered from serious disorders before dying. But it wasn’t until September 10 that Musk acknowledged the macaque deaths, although he denied that any of them were the result of a Neuralink implant. “We are extremely careful,” he stated in a company presentation. However, the PCRM claims Musk’s comments about the animal deaths were “misleading,” the Musk knew them “to be false,” and that investors “deserve to hear the truth about the safety and marketability” of Neuralink’s product. Musk’s firm has raised more than $280 million from outside investors.

From September 2017 through the end of 2020, the company’s experiments were assisted by staff from the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC). The U.S. magazine Wired has published an investigation in which it collated the public records of the scientific center and the testimony of a former Neuralink employee. According to the documents, 12 of the primates used for the studies suffered from bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema, or brain swelling, before dying.

The Wired investigation details a battery of complications that developed after the surgical implantation of the device into the monkeys’ brains. One of them, identified as “Animal 20″ in veterinary records, reportedly scratched at the surgical wound, dislodging part of the device. Researchers performed an intervention to repair the problem, but infections took hold. He was euthanized on January 6, 2020.

“Animal 15″ and “Animal 22″ also reportedly died from the implant procedures. The former, a female, was pressing her head against the ground, as a probable sign of pain or infection. Veterinarians observed her pulling at the implant until she bled. According to the Wired report, she would often lie at the foot of her cage and “hold hands with her roommate.”

Another test subject was euthanized in March 2020 after the screws used to implant the device became loose. A necropsy performed on the animal stated “the failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection.” Wired’s sources, who asked to remain anonymous, said the animals could not have died of natural causes and that they had them under their care for around a year before performing any surgery: “It’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason,” a researcher at the CNRPC told the magazine.

Neuralink is one step closer to placing implants in human brains and Musk laid out the company’s goal on his social network, X: “The first human patient will soon receive a Neuralink device. This ultimately has the potential to restore full body movement. In the long term, Neuralink hopes to play a role in AI civilizational risk reduction by improving human to AI (and human to human) bandwidth by several orders of magnitude. Imagine if Stephen Hawking had had this”

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