According to the tycoon, his creation will be able to restore mobility to damaged or amputated limbs and restore vision even to those blind from birth.
The always controversial Elon Musk, who lately cannot cope with so much controversy, stated during an event broadcast online that his Neuralink brain chip, which promises to connect the brain directly with computers, will begin human tests in six months.
It is not the first time that the tycoon, also the owner of Tesla, SpaceX and recently Twitter, has announced these trials with great fanfare: just a year ago he gave the same news for 2022, without specifying a specific date.
A term that, obviously, has not been fulfilled (like most of his predictions).
Neuralink is a penny-sized brain chip implanted in the brain that, Musk himself explained, could allow disabled patients to move and communicate again, or to restore vision “even people who never have been able to see before,” he said.
In fact, these will be, as he himself explained, the first objectives of Neuralink.
The idea is that people with amputated limbs, brain injuries or spinal damage can control a computer, mobile phone or any connected device with just their thoughts.
The company has been carrying out tests with monkeys since 2017.
In fact, the video of a primate with one of its electrodes implanted playing a video game with its eyes went viral.
However, months later, a report from the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine accused the company of subjecting its test animals to “extreme suffering” in which 15 of the 23 test monkeys died or had to be euthanized. . The company denied such accusations.
Still, the company has gone through all the paperwork to get approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to start clinical trials in people.
“We want to be extremely careful and make sure that it will work well before we put a device in a human,” Musk said.
“At first, progress, particularly as it relates to humans, will perhaps seem agonizingly slow, but we are doing everything we can to scale it in parallel,” he added. So, in theory, progress should be exponential.” The FDA has not yet ruled on the matter.