It appears that they have killed 1500 animals so far, that is a staggering number. For context most of the projects I've worked on use a total of a dozen or so animals over the course of the entire program, and those devices are on the market.
The type of system Neuralink is building - a surgical robot that implants thousands of individual active electrodes into the brain - has no comparable in med tech development history. But compare to original DBS, pacemaker, artificial heart - 100s to 1000s of animals for development.
(To be clear - you took something to market, and this same complexity gives me doubts about whether Neuralink will be able to!)
How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels, not euthanizing when undue suffering occurs, incorrect experimental parameters (Eg wrong chip sizes)?
> How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels
It doesn't, though my suspicion from reading the article is that these things are all reporting one side. Sealing a craniotomy (hole in the skull) is complicated, and while it is well known that vetbond on the cortical surface is a no-no, it's actually quite acceptable on the skull surface, my guess is that they had thought that the hole was sealed, but there was a crack that the vetbond went through. If you're developing a new way of making 100s of holes in the skull, I don't think it's surprising that it might not work how you model it in vitro. This is precisely why we do in vivo development in animal models. The wrong vertebra seems likely to be driven by Elon actively trying to hire engineers who don't know anything about neuroscience and then thinking he can train them fast. (I found that idea - which was in last years Neuralink presentation) incredibly annoying - typical Silicon Valley hubris.
Can you point me to any books, articles, etc that make the direct comparison that more complex devices means more animal trials Through an order of magnitude? I don’t know your personal expertise in the matter so I don’t know how to weigh the knowledge you’re telling me (and I don’t know either, which is why I’m asking). For example there’s someone in the thread who claims to have worked on complex devices and describes a different experience, and h want to weigh these knowledges relative to their contexts.
To be clear - I think referring to the sum of Neuralink's in vivo work as "trials" is a misnomer. They are doing basic R&D. A "trial" is when you have a device or drug that you believe will be functional to fix something. It's ironic, because the very thing that frustrates me to no end about how Elon Musk presents Neuralink to the public is biting him here. They are still a huge WORLD away from doing "trials". At this point, they're probably trying to get an IDE ("investigational device exemption") to begin to _test_ their devices in humans, which, in the case of brain-machine interfaces is still a huge step from having a clinical trial to treat something (and potentially get FDA approval).
Qualifications - I have about 20 years of experience in neural interfaces on the academic side (including in regulation of animal welfare). (I've even given a talk at Neuralink about my research). The Neuralink situation is really annoying from an academic perspective - they are doing really amazing tech development. What they presented last week in pigs and monkeys appears beyond what anyone currently can do reliably in the lab (of course it isn't peer reviewed). They have really good scientists that put up with the ridiculousness of working for Elon and are excited to advance knowledge and potentially impact health. The world of brain medicine has been stuck for three decades in a zone where we know (from neuroscience experiments in animals) that things like the symptoms of Parkinson's disease are complex multidimensional active processes whose treatment could be improved with high-bandwidth brain interfaces. But without those interfaces to use to develop the technology in people, there's no way to actually get to clinical trials. I think our hope with Neuralink is that Elon might fund them until they get past that point, and then there would be a virtuous cycle of data leading to discovery leading to treatment, but even at the ridiculous pace he's been driving them at, this is still a decadal problem. DARPA have invested $100Ms in this and still barely cracked it. And unlike the other scenarios he's worked in, there is no market for high bandwidth brain machine interfaces, and it's definitely worrying whether he'll lose interest when he finally realizes how hard the problem is from a market perspective.
I'm not a fanboy, I think there are definitely issues at Neuralink, and a cowboy attitude about animal care may be an issue. One of my acquaintances that no longer works there is a vet, so I wouldn't be surprised. ALL THAT SAID, the way that rodent experiments ("1500 ANIMALS!!!") and regulatory strategy decisions ("WRONG SIZE DEVICES IN PIGS"), are put together with a few actual tragic errors (vetbond leaking into some craniotomies and pigs implanted in the wrong spinal space), without acknowledgement that they have actually successfully implanted flexible probes into other pigs and monkeys for longer than has ever been done before (keeping in mind that the animals often are euthanized when they're data isn't good anymore) gives me the sense that this is a hit piece, and that the people that are piling on either must have strong opinions about animal research in general or don't really understand what the company is doing.
I have an intuitive and therefore undereducated sense that anything to do with Musk gets hyper escalated and it’s a detriment to everybody.
And yes, I also work on surgical robotics where we have the latest gpu hardware to do the latest "AI" and again, we don't need to do animal studies to test that code. You do animal studies even everything is seemingly perfect on the bench.
I've worked for 10+ companies that have been acquired snd killed by the Medteonics and J&Js of the world. That's the rule, not the exception.
They should start with a simpler device, get it on market, then go for the crazy stuff.
Prediction from someone who has worked on this stuff for 20 years - Neuralink will never have a on market device.
Those devices are developing on top of decades of research and use and not pushing into something so new aren't they? I am guessing it is probably less, but how many animals have been killed over the entire development of artificial hearts?
And something like a heart can be developed almost entirely outside of a body right? You can make an artificial heart pump blood in a lab. And then test pumping blood through a cadaver. Is there any way to external experiments like that for the brain? I wouldn't expect a cadaver to have neurons firing to be able to measure them. What experiments are they doing on live animals that could be done without them while still learning the same information?
You are exactly right. In artificial hearts you start with water, then glycol water that mimics the specific gravity and viscosity of blood, then dead blood from the Ranch 99, then you can get freshly drawn blood from an animal lab and keep that warm and circulate that, then you put the pump on the outside of an animal and plumb blood in and out, then after passing all that you do an animal implant. You can't use cadavers because they usually have their blood drained.
A parallel of this entire workflow exists for brain cells. You can grow animal neurons in a test tube and teach them to fly a flight simulator. This work was published 18 years ago, likely done a fair bit before then: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a...
Most of my work has been in active implantable like Artificial Hearts, LVADs, etc. as well as surgical robotics, dialysis, etc. Both are highly complex priducts and similar to Neuralink in their clinical work needs.
I'm not an Musk defender, and I'm a vegetarian, so this makes me at best uncomfortable. Knowing Musk, some deaths are probably due to pressure from the top, but this is a drop in the bucket when it comes to animal suffering.
Manson did kill people, he is in jail for doing so.
Right; torture is just a side effect. Same as with whatever Elon's doing in the name of science.
> Manson did kill people, he is in jail for doing so.
He didn't, and he died in 2017. He might have conspired in murders his cult carried out, but the evidence wasn't great.