A terrible outcome: monkeys from Elon Musk’s Neuralink experiment were sacrificed

Controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. that they recently announced that they will begin to recruit human volunteers for their testsis now resurfacing with a Wired report in English saying that many of the monkeys used in the experiments were sacrificed by the company.

This refutes the versions that Musk himself told the US SDA (Securities and Exchange Commission), as he stated that the primates died due to incurable diseases.

Musk first acknowledged the death of the macaques on September 10. Answer user on their social media app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any deaths were “the result of the Neuralink implant” and said the researchers were careful in selecting subjects who were already “close to death.”

Evidence collected in the report indicates that many monkeys were subjected to humiliation and experimentation bordering on torture, and were eventually sacrificed.

“From September 2017 to the end of 2020, the company’s experiments were assisted by staff at the California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC), a federally funded bioresearch center at the University of California, Davis. Musk’s promise was to revolutionize prosthetics and develop an implant that would allow the human brain to communicate wirelessly with artificial devices and even with each other,” the note states, contextualizing the fact of how the experiments were carried out.

However, the same doctors at the University of California at Davis admit in documents that after conducting electrode tests on monkeys, they experienced bloody diarrhea, swelling and partial paralysis.

Wired describes one specific case of primate killing:

“For example, during an experimental operation conducted in December 2019 to determine the “survival” of the implant, the inside of the device “broke” during its implantation. Overnight, the researchers observed the monkey, identified by UC Davis as Animal 20, scratching at the surgical site, causing a bloody discharge, and pulling on a connector, which ultimately dislodged part of the device. The next day, surgery was performed to correct the problem, but fungal and bacterial infections took over. Veterinary records indicate that the infection could not be cured, in part because the implant covered the infected area. The monkey was euthanized on January 6, 2020.

Other researchers at the UC Davis Medical Center claim that Elon Musk’s monkeys were young at the time of the experiments, so it is a mistake to think that they died from incurable diseases.