Elon Musk’s Neuralink is under federal investigation for potential animal rights violations. Company personnel complain that animal testing is carried out in a hurry, resulting in unnecessary suffering and death. This was reported by Reuters, based on documents and information from sources familiar with the investigation and the activities of the company.
Neuralink Corp is developing a brain implant that could help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological diseases. A previously unreported federal investigation was launched in recent months by the USDA inspector general at the request of a federal prosecutor. The investigation focuses on violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test certain animals.
Hastily failed tests had to be repeated, increasing animal deaths, employees said. Representatives of the company, as well as the USDA Inspector General, have so far declined to comment.
US law does not specify how many animals companies can use for research – it gives scientists considerable leeway in determining when and how to use animals in experiments. According to regulatory filings, Neuralink has passed all USDA inspections of its facilities.
Course
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Attracting new and retaining existing customers with wow service is possible! Go ahead and learn more.
REGISTER!
Overall, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys since 2018. Sources described the figure as an approximation, as the company does not keep accurate records of the number of animals tested and slaughtered. Neuralink has also done research in rats and mice.
The total number of animal deaths does not necessarily indicate that Neuralink is violating regulations or standard research practice. Many companies regularly use animals in experiments to improve human health. Animals are usually killed at the conclusion of experiments, often so that they can be examined posthumously for research purposes.
Current and former Neuralink employees say the number of animal deaths is higher than it should be for reasons related to Musk’s demands to speed up research. A Reuters investigation revealed four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that are tainted by human error. According to current and former employees of the company, the errors reduced the research value of the experiments and required the tests to be repeated, which led to the death of more animals. Errors are due to insufficient training of test personnel working in a rushed environment.
An employee wrote an angry letter to colleagues in 2022 about the need to rethink how the company organizes animal operations. The rushed schedule resulted in under-trained and over-stressed staff struggling to meet deadlines and making last-minute changes before surgeries, raising the risk to the animals.
Musk has made every effort to accelerate the development progress of Neuralink, which relies heavily on animal testing, employees said. Earlier this year, he sent out a news article to staff about Swiss researchers who have developed an electrical implant to help a paralyzed person walk again. “We could let people use their hands and walk again in everyday life!” After 10 minutes, Musk continued: “In general, we are just not moving fast enough. It drives me crazy!”
Several times over the years, Musk has asked employees to pretend they have a bomb strapped to their head to make them move faster, according to three sources who heard the comment multiple times. There have been numerous other pressure attempts.
A number of collaborators advocated a more traditional approach to testing, in which researchers would test one element at a time to draw appropriate conclusions before moving on to further animal testing. Neuralink’s management opted to speed up the tests, which led to animal deaths that could have been avoided in a classic study.
One former employee who approached management several years ago asking for more thorough testing was told by a senior executive that it was not possible given Musk’s speed requirements, the employee said. Several employees left the company because they did not share this approach.
Musk’s impatience with Neuralink grew as the company, which launched in 2016, missed deadlines several times to get regulatory approval to begin human clinical trials, according to employee testimonies.
Some of Neuralink’s competitors have done better. Synchron, which was launched in 2016 and is developing another implant with less ambitious medical advancement goals, has received FDA approval to begin human trials in 2021. The company’s development allowed paralyzed people to send text messages and type text with their mind without assistance. Synchron also did animal testing, but only about 80 sheep were killed as part of the research. Musk approached Synchron about a potential investment.
However, employees note that in some ways, Neuralink treats animals quite well compared to other research centers. According to one of them, the company has built a “Monkey Disneyland” in Austin, Texas, where lab animals can roam. In the company’s early years, Musk said he wanted the monkeys at his San Francisco Bay Area facility to live in the “monkey Taj Mahal.” Musk has said that he doesn’t like using animals for research and wants to make sure they were “the happiest animals” in life.
The first complaints about animal testing arose during the company’s partnership with UC Davis to conduct experiments. The animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a complaint with the USDA, blaming the Neuralink project for botched operations that killed monkeys, publicly releasing their findings. The group claimed that the surgeons used the wrong surgical adhesive twice, causing two of the monkeys to suffer and eventually die, while other monkeys experienced other complications from the implants.
The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California referred the animal rights group’s complaint to the USDA Inspector General, who has since launched a formal investigation. U.S. Department of Agriculture investigators then inquired about allegations relating to research on monkeys at the University of California, Davis.
Mistakes that have led to unnecessary animal deaths include one case in 2021, when 25 of the 60 pigs in the study had devices of the wrong size implanted in their heads. This error caused alarm among Neuralink researchers. In May 2021, scientist Viktor Kharazia wrote to colleagues that the error could be a “red flag” for reviewers of an FDA study that the company planned to submit as part of its application to start human trials. His colleagues agreed and the experiment was repeated with 36 sheep – in both experiments the animals were euthanized after the procedures.
In another case, employees accidentally implanted a Neuralink device in the wrong vertebra of two different pigs during two different surgeries. Other employees were indignant and said that the mistakes could have been easily avoided by carefully counting the vertebrae. Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised colleagues to immediately kill one of the pigs to end its suffering.
Employees sometimes dismissed Musk’s demands to act quickly. They once protested after a manager relayed Musk’s call for a complex operation on pigs soon. The objection was based on the fact that the complexity of the operation would increase the time that the pigs would be under anesthesia, leading to a risk to their recovery. The objectors argued that it was first necessary to figure out how to reduce the time needed for the operation.
Neuralink executives have publicly stated that the company only tests animals when it has exhausted other research options, but documents and reports suggest otherwise. During the presentation on November 30, Musk claimed that the operations were used at a later stage in the process to confirm that the device worked, and not to test early hypotheses. “We are very careful,” he said, “to make sure testing is ‘confirmatory, not exploratory’. Allegedly, animal testing was only done as a last resort after other methods had been tried.
In October, a month before Musk’s comments, Autumn Sorrells, head of animal care, ordered staff to retroactively remove the word “study” from research titles and stop using it in the future.
The Neuralink entries contain numerous references to research operations over several years. Competent company employees interviewed vehemently rejected the claim that Neuralink avoids research testing on animals. some of them expressed concern about Sorrells’ request to change the descriptions of the exploratory studies, stating that it would be a misleading inaccuracy. One of them noted that the request seemed to be aimed at presenting Neuralink in the best possible light.
A monkey with a Neuralink chip in the brain, typing on a PC with the “power of thought”, and human trials in six months – the main thing from Elon Musk’s speech
