According to US Department of Agriculture, the Inspector General of the USDA is currently investigating Neuralinkconcern about potential animal welfare violations in research testing. According to ReutersInternal documents reveal that employees have raised concerns about the company’s rush to test animals and cause unnecessary suffering and death.
According to the news agency, 1,500 animals have been killed by the company since 2018, including more than 280 sheep, monkeys, and pigs. These numbers don’t necessarily indicate that Neuralink is breaking the law. However, the USDA has inspected all of the company’s facilities. Current and former employees have been informed ReutersHowever, Neuralink founders put pressure on them Elon MuskAccelerating development has resulted in faulty experiments, and death rates that are higher than necessary.
Musk reportedly told employees that he had been telling them since 2016 when the company was founded to help them get faster. According to some reports, he also told employees that he would make the market fail if they did not make progress. Some employees took this as an indication that he was going to close down the company. Musk also sent staff members earlier this year an email with an article about Swiss researchers that created an implant to help paralyzed persons walk again. Reuters said. “In general, it is simply not happening fast enough. It is driving me crazy!” He wrote it in a subsequent email.
After reviewing the internal testing documentation, ReutersAccording to Neuralink, it discovered four experiments involving 86 monkeys and two pigs that had results that were questionable because of human errors. Neuralink was forced to repeat the experiments, resulting in more deaths. An angry employee wrote a message about how the rushed animal surgery had resulted in employees being underprepared and stressed, which led to mistakes. A few examples Reuters found in the documents detailed how Neuralink staff implanted the company’s brain-machine interface device on the wrong vertebra of two different pigs — something that could’ve been easily prevented by counting the animals’ vertebrae — forcing the team to kill them to end their suffering.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine was established earlier in the year by an animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. AccusedThe company performed surgeries that resulted in the death of monkeys. Neuralink acknowledged that six monkeys were killed in a joint study it did with the University of California at Davis. This was due to problems caused by their experiments. They defended their research, claiming that it did not violate any laws.
Neuralink held an announcement event recently announcing it could start human trialsWithin the next six months. Elon Musk, the founder of the company, responded directly to the Phyisicians Committee allegations: “Before any device is placed in an animal, we conduct rigorous benchtop testing. We are not hesitant about putting these devices in animals. We’re extremely careful and we always want the device, whenever we do the implant — whether into a sheep, pig or monkey — to be confirmatory, not exploratory,” he said.
ReutersHowever, the company said that it had found Neuralink records that contained numerous references to “exploratory surgery.” Autumn Sorrells (Neuralink’s Animal Care Director) reportedly also ordered employees to delete “exploration” from study titles in October and stop using the term moving forward.
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