Elon Musk is once again in the spotlight of bioethics experts for his company’s treatment of animals in trials of the Neuralink brain-interface device. Already in December 2022 it was announced that an investigation was underway into the deaths of more than 1,500 animals. Now, a team of American doctors has denounced the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the death of twelve initially healthy monkeys.
This is an especially serious accusation for two reasons. On the one hand, because on September 10, Musk announced on his X account that no monkeys had died during the experiments. And also that, just in case, they had chosen terminal primates. This would mean deception on the part of the company’s CEO, who arrives just when the company has received the green light to begin the Neuralink clinical trials with humans.
At the moment this complaint is only about a letter from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. However, if the SEC chooses to study what happened, it would be a second investigation for animal abuse, which would come at the worst of times for Neuralink.
History of animal abuse by Neuralink
Neuralink is a brain-computer device with which Elon Musk wants us to be able to mentally connect to the internet. This would have many futuristic applications, almost taken from Black Mirror. But it could also be very useful in healthcare, since it would help patients with cerebral palsy to communicate and move in a normal way. much more fluid.
Since it is a device that is implanted in the brain, it is important to be clear about its proper functioning and safety before using it in humans. Therefore, since the founding of the company in 2016, Musk’s team has been collecting animals of different species for their research.
It is normal for these types of clinical trials to be carried out in science. However, some must be followed ethical criteria very important, which include the initial study in cultured cells, to begin experiments with animals with minimal guarantees. Minimum suffering should also be sought, avoiding sacrifices as much as possible and ensuring that they are made in the least painful way possible.
Since 2018, it is estimated that around 1,500 animals have died in Neuralink laboratories. This includes monkeys, pigs, sheep and other species. Death in itself does not indicate that experimental animals have been poorly treated. At least not, according to what American laws dictate. However, the dissatisfied employees themselves have started to complain on several occasions about the implementation of bad habits that have pushed avoidable sacrifices.
Everything has been said, from implants placed in the wrong vertebra to a poor choice of device size. All this has caused damage to the animals that has forced them to be sacrificed. Employees insist it’s all down to rush from Musk and other Neuralink executives to finish as soon as possible with the trials prior to its use in humans.
The truth is that it is not the only group of scientists that is studying this type of interfaces. There are other researchers, public or private, who work on the same clues. Therefore, the first to finish will be the ones who take the biggest piece of the cake. And that, if you do not work with a cool head, is a fact that can lead some businessmen to work as quickly as possible, leaving ethics aside.
12 deceased monkeys and hoaxes on the Internet
This week, Neuralink received its desired permission to begin clinical trials in humans with cerebral palsy. This has been possible after the supposed successful completion of the experiments with monkeys.
But the authors of the letter that has just been published warn that there have been several lies in that announcement.
It is enough to go to the records of the experiments of the University of California, Davis, where they were carried out, to see several inconsistencies. To begin with, we talk about sacrifice of at least 15 monkeys. Of them, it is true that 3 were terminal animals, which would have also died in a very short time. The other 12 were initially healthy. But they had to be sacrificed due to symptoms like chronic infections, brain swelling, or loss of balance and coordination.
The primates used, as is often the case in science, are rhesus macaques. This is a species that has a hope of half life of 25 years. In some cases, they can even reach 40. However, those who were sacrificed in these clinical trials were an average of 7.5 years old. Therefore, these were not already dying animals.
After the complaints that Neuralink already received in 2022, it is clear that this new notice can raise blisters. Now we will have to wait for the SEC’s decision. If the entire process must stop until it is verified whether things have been done without violating the Animal Welfare Law, another company could overtake Musk on the right. And haste is not a good advisor. Much less when the lives of thousands of living beings are in your hands. Nothing, not even all the gold in the world, should be above that.