The breakneck speed at Neuralink likely caused researchers to test and kill more animals. Since 2018, the company has tested on and killed at least 1,500 animals - over 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, as well as mice and rats.
KENNY TORRELLA: Among the many grievances people harbor toward Elon Musk, add one more: alleged animal cruelty. Neuralink, a startup co-founded by Musk in 2016, aims to develop a brain chip implant that it claims could one day help paralyzed people walk and blind people see. But to do that, the company has first been testing its technology on animals, killing some 1,500 since 2018 — and employee whistleblowers recently told Reuters the experiments are going horribly wrong.
Reuters reported this week that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Inspector General has opened a probe into potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act at Neuralink. It’s a rare corrective for an agency that is generally hands-off when it comes to animal research…
Questions around Neuralink’s treatment of animals date back to 2017, when Neuralink conducted experiments on monkeys at the University of California Davis. The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that campaigns for alternatives to animal testing, obtained public records detailing the experiments. The findings were gruesome: One rhesus macaque monkey’s nausea was “so severe that the animal vomited and had open sores in her esophagus before she was finally killed,” according to Ryan Merkley, PCRM’s director of research advocacy.
Surgeons used an unapproved adhesive to fill open spaces in an animal’s skull, created from implanting the Neuralink device, “which then caused the animal to suffer greatly due to brain hemorrhaging,” Merkley said. He also pointed to “instances of animals suffering from chronic infections, like staph infections where the implant was in their head. There were animals pulling out their hair and self-mutilating, which are signs of really poor psychological health in laboratory animals and are very common in rhesus macaques” and other primates…
A few years later, Neuralink moved its experiments in-house. Current and former employees told Reuters that Musk put staff under immense pressure to speed up animal trials in order to begin human trials, telling them that they had to imagine a bomb was strapped to their head as motivation to work harder and faster… The breakneck speed at Neuralink likely caused researchers to test and kill more animals than a slower, more conventional approach would call for. Since 2018, the company has tested on and killed at least 1,500 animals — over 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, as well as mice and rats…
In February, PCRM filed a complaint with the USDA alleging violations of the Animal Welfare Act stemming from the earlier Neuralink experiments at UC Davis. In March, the USDA posted inspection reports of both UC Davis and Neuralink facilities and found zero violations. But a federal prosecutor in the Northern District of California sent PCRM’s complaint to the USDA Inspector General (OIG), a federal office charged with investigating and auditing USDA programs, which then opened a formal probe, according to Reuters. When contacted, the USDA OIG responded “USDA OIG can neither confirm or deny any investigation.”
That the USDA found no violations at UC Davis or Neuralink “just shows you how weak the Animal Welfare Act is, and even more so how weak the enforcement of that law is,” Merkley said. The USDA declined an interview request for this story but said in an emailed statement, “USDA takes its charge to enforce the AWA seriously, and works diligently every day to protect the welfare of regulated animals.”
The “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley can be dangerous enough when a company is building a new social network, but the stakes are far higher when the life and death of hundreds or thousands of animals is in question, let alone the human patients whom Neuralink hopes will be the ultimate recipients of its technology. But it would be a mistake to think of Musk and Neuralink as a mere bad apple. Cruel animal experiments are taking place not just at private medical companies, but also at universities, commercial research facilities, and government agencies across the country — and regulators are lagging behind…
Animal testing is often justified using a kind of moral math: It’s worth killing X number of animals if it leads to outcome Y, like helping paralyzed people walk or blind people see… But moral math is hard to do if you’re missing half the equation. We have no idea how many animals are experimented on because federal agencies don’t keep a comprehensive tally. In fiscal year 2018, the USDA reported that 780,070 AWA-covered animals were used in experiments, with an additional 122,717 held in facilities but not used for research. But that number excludes birds, reptiles, and fish, as well as rats and mice, who make up the vast majority of animals used in experiments — over 99 percent according to veterinarian Larry Carbone, who estimates the US experiments on 111.5 million rats and mice per year. SOURCE…
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