Elon Musk and Neuralink 3000 monkeys claim explored amid human trial announcement

American business magnate Elon Musk has revealed that his neurotechnology start-up, Neuralink, is expected to begin human trials in the next six months.

On November 30, the 51-year-old personality held a "Show and Tell" event for select invitees at Neuralink's headquarters in San Francisco, California, that lasted almost three hours.

Musk said:

"We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human."

The company is developing a brain chip that could help disabled people move and communicate again, as well as restore their vision.

"Even if someone has never had vision, ever, like they were born blind, we believe we can still restore vision."

The company has been conducting animal tests in recent years to seek a green flag from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before beginning clinical trials on people.

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Netizens react to Elon Musk's latest announcement

After the news that Elon Musk's company was planning to conduct human trials went viral, Twitterati was furious. Several users claimed that the company's experiments have killed almost 3,000 monkeys in a year, which in fact, is not true.

The claim is false and a screenshot of a USA Today article stating the same has been making rounds on the internet. However, the article is nowhere to be found.

The fake viral screenshot made several users believe the story was true as they bashed Neuralink after the human trial announcement.

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Neuralink experimented on monkeys

Neuralink has been experimenting with animals before diving deep into the human brain. In 2020, the company conducted its first Show and Tell event that featured a pig with a brain implant. A year later, the event saw a monkey with a brain chip playing a video game with just its mind.

According to the Daily Mail, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) launched a website detailing the experiments that several monkeys suffered during the aforementioned experiment at the University of California.

The lab notes obtained by the publication show neurosurgeon Matthew MacDougall's name "running the procedures" which involved implanting electrodes in monkeys during surgeries.

The Neuralink implant is a small neural interface device with 3,000 electrodes that can be implanted at 30 to 200 threads per minute into the brain. Conducted by a neurosurgical robot, the device can put delicate threads into the brain tissue without messing with the blood vessels.

Describing it in his recent presentation, Musk said:

"It’s like replacing a piece of your skull with a smartwatch, for lack of a better analogy.”

In February 2022, PCRM filed a lawsuit that stated that the animals "suffered infections from the implanted electrodes placed in their brains." The lawsuit also stated that a substance called BioGlue killed monkeys by damaging "portions of their brains."

The activist group also claimed that the experiments were conducted at UC Davis, and Elon Musk's company paid $1.4 million to use the institution's facilities.

These claims were confirmed by a blog on Neuralink's website that talked about animal welfare during experiments.

"As part of this work, two animals were euthanized at planned end dates to gather important histological data, and six animals were euthanized at the medical advice of the veterinary staff at UC Davis."

Neuralink has been using Macaque monkeys to test its Neuralink implantable chip that communicates with computers via a small receiver.

In April 2021, the company shared that monkeys play a computer game, Pong, using just their minds. As proof, they released the video of a monkey named Pager that used a cursor on the screen without any controller.

This was possible as the chip transferred the information from the monkey's neuron into a decoder which predicted the monkey's hand movements.