Last week, a shocking report claimed that 15 out of the 23 monkey’s that were used for trials in Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip implants startup had died due to prolonged issues from the testing. Now, the company has denied these claims that said that the researchers at the University of California Davis abused monkeys in experiments backed by the brain-computer interface setup. In a statement, Neuralink has responded to a federal complaint from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) that alleges that Neuralink and its researchers at the Univesity conducted inhumane tests on monkeys.
“Pretty much every single monkey that had had implants put in their head suffered from pretty debilitating health effects," the statement from PCRM said last week. Neuralink, in a response, said that the lab “did and continues to meet federal mandated standards." However, Neuralink has since moved the animals to an in-house facility. The PCRM complaint, filed with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) against University of California Davis is based on documents released after a public records lawsuit.
Animals at Neuralink are respected and honored by our team. Without proper context, information from medical records and study data can be misleading. In this blog post, we want to provide an accurate statement of Neuralink’s commitment to animal welfare. https://t.co/Lc9P3URorF— Neuralink (@neuralink) February 14, 2022
A separate tweet from Neuralink calls this description “misleading" and lacking context. It says that several animals with a “wide range of pre-existing conditions unrelated to our research" were euthanised so that researchers could practice the implant surgery on cadavers, and six more were euthanized because of infections related to the implant or a complication involving BioGlue, a widely used surgical adhesive.
The documents, as pointed out in reports, outline a partnership that provided the university with $1.4 million (roughly Rs 10.50 crores) and ran between 2017 and 2020. The researchers allegedly tested an implant “approximately the size of a quarter coin" that was anchored to the skull of a macaque monkey test subjects.
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PCRM says that the team at Elon Musk‘s Neuralink failed to provide dying monkey’s with adequate veterinary care, used an unapproved substance called ‘BioGlue’ that killed monkeys by destroying portions of their brains, and failed to provide the psuchological well-being of monkeys assigned to the experiment.
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