After electric cars, space rockets and the world of social media, the latest venture by Elon Musk are the chip in brain. Neuralink, the brain implant company of the most talked about billionaire ever, said Thursday, May 26 that it had obtained theauthorization laid down by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct the first clinical study of its investigational device in humans. “We are thrilled to report that we have received FDA approval to begin our first human clinical trial!” Neuralink announced on Twitter, calling it “an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people” .
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval would mark a milestone for the California-based company, which, with Musk's backing, has brought tremendous resources and investor attention to a field known as brain-computer interface, in which scientists and engineers are developing electronic chips that can decode brain activity and communicate it to computers. The company has only conducted research on animals so far, and it's unclear when clinical trials in people might begin.
Why does Musk dream of inserting chips into his brain? Fight some serious pathologies, such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's but also to restore the functionality of people suffering from paralysis and debilitating pathologies such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. But not only. In the future, the aim is for a "computerized" and therefore enhanced brain that could allow us to better manage the "society of robots" towards which we travel, as he himself declared, revealing disturbing scenarios.
Chips in the brain: the results on animals
The South African tycoon has said several times since 2019 that his brain chip company would soon get FDA approval for human trials. But the company's application was rejected. Since last December, the startup has also been under a federal investigation for the deaths of 1500 animals caused by the tests. But what results have they had so far? Coin-sized chips were implanted in the skulls of pigs e monkeys.
For example, the experimentation on Gertrude, presented by Musk in 2020, is known. The pig showed signs of connection between the electrodes attached to its snout and the PC.
Instead, several monkeys were able to "play" video games or "type" words on a screen simply by following the movement of the cursor with their eyes.
Chips in the brain: the experiments of other companies before Musk
Actually companies like Blackrock Neurotech e Synchronous they've already implanted their devices into humans for clinical trials, and at least 42 people worldwide have brain computer implants. Such devices have made feats possible that once belonged to the realm of science fiction: a paralyzed man punching Barack Obama with a robotic hand, an ALS patient typing while thinking about keystrokes, a quadriplegic patient walk albeit with a slow but natural step.
While most companies trying to commercialize brain implants they focus on people with medical needs, Neuralink has even greater ambitions: to create a device that not only restores human functions, but the better ones, as often stated by Musk himself in even too exalted tones: “We want to go beyond the capacity of a normal human body with our technology ”, “This technology is so safe that I would implant it on my children”.
The reactions
When Neuralink tweeted the news, i Comments they were filled with praise and good wishes on the one hand, but also with criticism and reproaches on the other. In reality the negative comments are due to an apparent distrust of Musk and not of the technology itself.
But being visionary and unconventional in the long run can lead to delusions of omnipotence. Truth be told, the billionaire's business consists of extremely ambitious ideas such as living on Mars, self-driving cars, solving the traffic problem, and making people on the Internet talk responsibly. But these ambitions have also been accompanied by several failures, such as the explosion of SpaceX mega-rocket in April (which according to Musk was an expected result) and the stalling of The Boring Company's projects in Washington DC and Los Angeles in 2021 (to build a system of underground tunnels to solve the traffic problem). Not forgetting the near bankruptcy of Tesla and SpaceX in 2008, his involvement in PayPal and the tweet in which he threatened to delist Tesla which resulted in a lawsuit. Added to this is the Guinness World Record for greatest loss of assets personal history, so much so that he loses the primacy of richest man in the world.
