Neuralink, the neurotechnology startup funded by Elon Musk, will continue to implant its hardware devices in people.
Neuralink, the neuroscientific startup funded by Elon Musk, has received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to implant its experimental brain chip in its next patient. This surgery aims to address some issues that arose after the initial implantation.
Previously, Neuralink implanted its experimental brain-machine interface chip in a paralyzed patient named Noland Arbaugh in January of this year. Arbaugh's identity was revealed in a live interview in March, during which the patient demonstrated some abilities granted by the chip, including playing computer chess with his mind. However, it was recently revealed that Arbaugh's chip malfunctioned and experienced data leakage for a period of time.
According to the initial report by The Wall Street Journal, the company has now obtained federal government approval to continue implanting chips in patients and has promised to address the malfunctions that caused issues with Arbaugh's chip. The malfunction occurred due to some tiny wires attached to the chip becoming loose, preventing the transmission of his brain signals to the company's servers. In the next surgery, Neuralink plans to implant these tiny wires deeper into the brain of the next patient. According to a source, the company aims to implant its chips in up to 10 more patients by the end of this year.
Arbaugh recently spoke about his experience with the company in a series of news interviews. In a conversation with Bloomberg, Arbaugh explained his disappointment when the chip started malfunctioning:
"I started losing control of the cursor. I thought they made some changes, so that's why it happened... But then they told me that these wires were being pulled out of my brain. At first, they didn't know how serious it would be or what exactly was happening... It was really hard to accept. I thought I had another month, but my journey was coming to an end. I thought they would continue collecting some data, but they really moved on to the next person. I cried for a while."
However, Arbaugh stated that software updates to the chip allowed him to regain many of the abilities he had before, and he still strongly supports Neuralink and everything the company has done for him.
To implant Neuralink's chip, human surgeons must make a small hole in the patient's skull, after which a 7-foot-tall robot named "R1" stitches the electrified wires of the implant directly into the brain. The hardware then sits beneath the portion of the patient's skull that has been removed, just below the scalp, while its tiny wires transmit data between the brain and the startup's servers. The company previously tested the chip on animals, sometimes with disastrous consequences. According to a lawsuit by a group of doctors, a significant number of the company's animal test subjects had to be euthanized, some in a rather tragic manner.
