NEURALINK IMPLANTS BRAIN CHIP IN FIRST HUMAN – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Neuralink clearance to conduct its first trial
Elon Musk, Neuralink’s billionaire founder, said the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans.”The first @Neuralink product is called Telepathy,” Musk added.
The study will assess the functionality of the interface which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control devices with their thoughts, according to the company’s website.
The implant marks a significant step for Neuralink, which has faced regulatory hurdles due to safety concerns, and places it among several companies — including Blackrock Neurotech and Synchron — that have tested brain implants on humans. Musk, whose business empire includes Tesla, SpaceX and X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been credited with reinvigorating interest in the decades-old field, known as brain-computer interface, and has hyped it up by suggesting it could be used to enhance human function more broadly.
On its website, Neuralink advertises its ambition of creating a technology to “restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.”
However, the company has faced obstacles that have critics sceptical of its goals. In November, four U.S. lawmakers asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate if Musk misled investors about the safety of his brain implant after veterinarian records indicated experiments in monkeys resulted in “debilitating health effects