Is anybody brave enough to be a guinea pig in Elon Musk’s brain trial?

BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk has come one step closer to getting inside people’s heads.

The entrepreneur’s company Neuralink has announced it has regulatory approval to trial its brain implants in humans – although recruitment for brave volunteers has not yet started.

Mr Musk has suggested the brain implants will one day enable ‘superhuman intelligence’, allowing us to merge our minds with machines and become cyborgs, in order to overcome the threat from artificial intelligence. It is also claimed it could help the blind to see, paralysed people to walk and enable the saving and replaying of memories.

Earlier this year Neuralink’s vicepresident of engineering told a conference that the short-term goal is to help paralysed patients communicate using their thoughts, producing

‘Expensive and risky procedures’

computerised text without typing. Approval by the US Food and Drug Administration would mark a milestone for the company.

Up until now, it has conducted research only in animals. Announcing the trials on Twitter, Neuralink said: ‘We are excited to share that we have received the FDA’s approval to launch our first-in-human clinical study!

‘[This] represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people.’

However, the FDA has not yet confirmed its approval.

The news from Mr Musk follows concerns about animal experiments used to test the technology.

In 2021, Neuralink released footage appearing to show a male monkey playing a video game using chips embedded on each side of its brain, controlling it simply by thinking about moving his hand up or down.

Earlier this month, it was reported that US lawmakers planned to ask regulators to investigate whether the panel overseeing testing at Neuralink approved experiments which resulted in the unnecessary deaths and suffering of animals.

In all, around 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, have died following experiments at Neuralink since 2018, according to news agency Reuters.

Mr Musk made headlines last year when he said he was so confident in the safety of brain implants that he would be willing to use them on his own children. The brain chips contain electrodes attached to wires thinner than a human hair, which can pick up brain signals. The chips then decode and relay information to devices using Bluetooth.

Mr Musk is well known for championing cutting-edge technology, from electric cars at Tesla to reusable rockets at his firm SpaceX.

But Neuralink had previously struggled to get regulatory approval for human clinical trials, due to safety concerns including the lithium battery, the potential for wires to migrate to other areas of the brain, and questions over how the device can be removed without damaging tissue.