Enlarge / A Neuralink implant.
Neuralink
Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk said the first person implanted with the company's brain chip is now able to move a mouse cursor just by thinking.
“Progress is good and the patient appears to have made a full recovery, with no known adverse effects that we are aware of. The patient can move a mouse across the screen just by thinking,” Musk said Monday during an X-Spaces event. according to Portal.
Musk's update came a few weeks after he announced that Neuralink had implanted a chip in humans. The previous update was also made on X, Musk's social network, formerly called Twitter.
Musk reportedly said during yesterday's chat: “We're trying to get as many keystrokes out of thinking as possible. This is what we are currently working on: Can you move the left mouse button, the right mouse button, the mouse down and the mouse up?” . We want to have more than just two buttons.”
Neuralink itself appears to have made no comment on the patient's progress. We contacted the company today and will update this article if we receive a response.
“Basic ethical standards” not met
Neuralink's method of releasing information was criticized last week by Arthur Caplan, a bioethics professor and head of the department of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Science through press releases, while increasingly common, is not science,” Caplan and Moreno wrote in a paper published by the nonprofit Hastings Center. “When the person who pays for a human experiment and has a strong financial interest in the outcome is the sole source of information, basic ethical standards are not being met.”
Caplan and Moreno admitted that Neuralink and Musk appear to be legally “in the clear”:
Assuming that some brain-computer interface device was actually implanted into a patient with severe paralysis by some surgeon somewhere, it would be reasonable to expect formal reporting of the details of an unprecedented experiment on a vulnerable person. But unlike drug trials, which have phases that must be registered in a public database, the Food and Drug Administration does not require reporting of early feasibility studies of devices. From a legal perspective, Musk's company is in the clear, a fact that was certainly not lost on his company's lawyers.
However, they argue that opening “a living human's brain to insert a device” should have been accompanied by more public details. There is an ethical obligation to “avoid the risk of giving false hope to untold thousands of people with severe neurological disabilities,” they wrote.
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A brain implant could lead to complications that worsen the patient's condition, the ethics professors noted. “We are not even told what plans there are to remove the device if something goes wrong or the subject simply wants to stop,” Caplan and Moreno wrote. “We also do not know the results of the animal experiments that justified the start of a first experiment on humans at this point, especially since this is not life-saving research.”
Clinical study is still pending
Neuralink has been criticized for alleged mistreatment of animals in research and was reportedly fined $2,480 for violating U.S. Department of Transportation regulations on transporting hazardous materials following inspections of company facilities last year.
People “should continue to be skeptical about the safety and functionality of any devices manufactured by Neuralink,” the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said after announcing the first implant last month.
“The Physicians Committee continues to encourage Elon Musk and Neuralink to move toward the development of a noninvasive brain-computer interface,” the group said. “Researchers elsewhere have already made progress in improving patient health using such noninvasive methods that do not involve the risk of surgical complications, infections, or additional surgeries to repair faulty implants.”
In May 2023, Neuralink announced that it had received approval from the Food and Drug Administration for clinical trials. The company's previous attempt to gain approval was reportedly rejected by the FDA due to safety concerns and other “deficiencies.”
In September, the company said it was recruiting volunteers, particularly people with quadriplegia due to cervical spine injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Neuralink said the first-in-human clinical trial for PRIME (Precise Robotic I amplanted brain-computer interfacee) will evaluate the safety of his implant and surgical robot and evaluate the initial functionality of our BCI [brain-computer interface] to enable paralyzed people to control external devices with their minds.”