The Truth About The Tragic Death Of Elon Musk's Neuralink Monkeys

March 2024 ยท 5 minute read

Highlights

Elon Musk has been the center of multiple scandals in the last few years. There's his messy Twitter takeover, that recent feud with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and his complicated on-and-off relationship with Grimes. At one point, he was also tagged to the defamation trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp.

Now, he's facing another legal issue following the deaths of his test monkeys for Neuralink, a company working on implantable brain-computer interface. Recently, it was discovered that the controversial "disruptor" lied about what really happened to the monkeys. Here's the truth about their "gruesome" deaths.

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In December 2022, Musk showed off a Neuralink test monkey typing telepathically and picking out its own snack in a demo. "Here you can see Sake, that's one of our other monkeys, typing on a keyboard. This is telepathic typing," he said in a viral clip. "Though to be clear, he's not actually using a keyboard. He's moving the cursor with his mind to the highlighted key. Now technically, he can't actually spell. So I don't wanna oversell this thing, because that's the next version."

The Tesla CEO also clarified that his startup "cares about animal welfare" and that the monkeys enjoy these demos. "Sake actually likes doing the demo. He's not like strapped to the chair or anything," he quipped. "The monkeys actually enjoy doing the demos. And they get the banana smoothies, so it's kind of a fun game. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we care here about animal welfare. And I'm pretty sure our monkeys are pretty happy."

At the time the video went viral, Musk tweeted that they "were now confident that the Neuralink device is ready for humans, so timing is a function of working through the FDA process." The said device is a brain chip that can be implanted within the skull to help mobilize disabled patients, as well as allow them to communicate and restore their vision. In May 2023, the company announced that they'd received FDA approval for human trials.

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On September 20, 2023, Wired reported on the "gruesome" death of a Neuralink male monkey that was euthanized in March 2020 "after his cranial implant became loose." The necropsy found that "the failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical and not exacerbated by infection."

Musk initially denied such deaths and even said that the company "chose terminal mon[k]eys (close to death already)" to "minimize risk to healthy monkeys." However, a former employee slammed his comments as "ridiculous" and "straight fabrication." As it turned out, they'd had the monkeys "for a year or so before any surgery was performed."

Another test subject called Animal 15 also had to be euthanized, months after an experiment in December 2019 that resulted in a Neuralink brain implant breaking off during the surgical procedure. The monkey "began to press her head against the floor for no apparent reason," days after it received the implant. A necropsy report stated that the implants caused the monkey's brain to bleed and left parts of her cerebral cortex "focally tattered."

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) discovered that Neuralink has killed a total of 1,500 animals since 2018. That includes 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys. The company previously admitted to euthanizing eight monkeys earlier this year rather than the 15 which PCRM alleges.

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Five days after his viral telepathically typing monkey demo, Reuters exclusively reported that Musk was under federal investigation over the deaths of Neuralink's test animals. The med-tech startup was reportedly accused of "animal-welfare violations" following complaints from former staff who also claimed that the animal tests were "being rushed."

Reuters also cited an employee accusing the company of organizing animal operations to prevent "hack jobs" and that these rushed experiments "resulted in under-prepared and over-stressed staffers scrambling to meet deadlines and making last-minute changes before surgeries, raising risks to the animals."

The outlet went on to reveal that Musk sent his employees a news article about Swiss researchers who successfuly created an electrical implant that enabled a paralyzed man to walk again. "We could enable people to use their hands and walk again in daily life!" he wrote to them on February 8, 2023. Ten minutes later, he added: "In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!"

Despite the federal probe, Musk said in June 2023 that Neuralink will start its first human trial this year. "It's looking like the first case will be later this year," he said at the VivaTech event in Paris, a month after they've received FDA clearance to test the brain implants on humans. On September 19, 2023, the SpaceX founder announced that they've begun recruitment for Neuralink's first human trial.

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