A report revealed that thousands of people have expressed interest in removing part of their skull and implanting Elon Musk’s chip, as his company Neuralink has a vision of treating conditions such as paralysis and blindness by connecting brains to computers with the help of microchips.
According to the British Daily Mail, it takes a number of volunteers willing to remove part of their skull to achieve this, so that the robot can insert a chip into their brain and prove the success of the technology in humans.
These implants have so far only been tested on monkeys and pigs, and one of Musk’s biographers, Ashley Vance, noted that Neuralink has received an influx of interest from thousands of potential patients who want to be a sample for the first human trials.
He said that the company has not yet implanted its device in humans, but it aims to operate it on 11 people next year and more than 22,000 by 2030, and it is not clear whether participants will be paid for participation.
Neuralink launched a campaign for first human trials in September, saying it was looking for people with paralysis to test its experimental device as part of a six-year study.
But the company has been plagued by controversy in recent years, raising ethical concerns and raising skepticism among neuroscientists and other experts.
Vance, who wrote the 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” wrote in a Bloomberg report that the ideal candidate for Neuralink’s first human trial is an adult under 40 with paralysis in all four limbs.
He explained that it will take two hours for the surgeon to perform the resection, and another 25 minutes for the chip to be inserted by the robot into the area of the brain that controls the hands, wrists and forearms.
“The goal is to show that the device can safely collect useful data from that part of a patient’s brain, a major step in Neuralink’s efforts to turn a person’s thoughts into a set of commands that a computer can understand,” Vance added. The implant will transfer that information to a nearby laptop or tablet, he said.
Vance, who said he visited Neuralink facilities 10 times in three years, revealed how Musk pushed his company to fend off the threat posed by similar computer startups Synchron and Onward.
Both companies have already begun human trials, which prompted the billionaire to rage last year, and in response, he reportedly told Neuralink it needed to pick up the pace.
Safety concerns meant that the company struggled for a while to obtain the necessary approval for human trials, especially with the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Key issues included the device’s lithium battery, the potential for the implant’s wires to travel within the brain, and the challenge of safely extracting the device without damaging brain tissue.
The US Food and Drug Administration later granted approval in May, but did not reveal how its initial concerns would be resolved. However, even if the device is proven safe for human use, experts have warned that it could take more than a decade for Neuralink to get clearance to commercialize it.
2023-11-09 23:00:00
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