NEURALINK: From Murdered Monkeys To Human Trials

“Imagine if Stephen Hawking had had this,” Elon Musk said on X on Sep 19, 2023, after Neuralink announced that the first human patient will soon be outfitted with a Neuralink device. “Neuralink is absolutely mind-boggling,” he X’ed on the platform hours later.

“We are happy to announce that we’ve received approval from the independent institutional review board and our first hospital site to begin recruitment for our first-in-human clinical trial,” stated Neuralink’s press release.

It was only last year that I reported on Neuralink’s mutilated monkeys and the scandal involving the University of California, Davis. Read: Elon Musk’s Cruel Neuralink Experiments Kills 15th MONKEY, Are Humans Next? Now their brain device has the potential to restore full-body movement?

I even interviewed Ryan Mekely of the Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine (PCRM). They were the first group to obtain internal records detailing painful, deadly experiments conducted on monkeys by Neuralink in partnership with the U.C. Davis.

One of the infected monkeys mentioned was a rhesus macaque labeled “Animal 11” by UC Davis, reported PCRM. In December 2018, Neuralink staff drilled two holes in her skull and implanted electrodes in her brain. They attached metal plates to her head with bone screws and stitched up her skin around the implants.

Quickly, the surgical sites became infected and her “skin was eroded.” Finally, three months after they put her under the knife, as the infections persisted, they killed her. A necropsy revealed that she had been suffering from “acute” bleeding in her brain and her cerebral cortex had been “tattered” by Neuralink’s devices.

In December 2022, PCRM requested that the FDA investigate Neuralink for violations of the agency’s “good laboratory practices” regulations, which are designed to assure the quality and integrity of nonclinical laboratory studies. As of March 31, 2023, the agency had not inspected Neuralink. Instead, they granted FDA approval.

“Musk needs to drop his obsession with sticking a device in our heads,” says Merkley, director of research advocacy with the Physicians Committee. “If he cared about the health of patients, he would invest in a noninvasive brain-computer interface.”