© Neuralink
Elon Musk has just announced on X that his company Neuralink succeeded in placing a brain implant on a first patient on Sunday January 28. This operation consists of adding an object called a brain-machine interface, as large as the size of a coin.
“The first human received a Neuralink implant yesterday and is recovering well. The first results show promising detection of neuron spikes”, underlined the entrepreneur on the social network.
Il then explained that this product is called Telepathy (telepathy in French) without saying more. And the latter adds:
This allows you to control your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, simply by thinking. The first users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a typist or an auctioneer. This is the goal.
Neuralink has been criticized in the past
< p>As we explained to you in our previous articles, the company has no shortage of ambitions for this technology. It is notably supposed to restore sight to the blind, treat depression, or even allow paralyzed people to walk again.
These promises logically caught the eye of investors, so much so that Neuralink was valued at $5 billion last June, recalls the Reuters news agency. However, several American legislators requested an investigation from the watchdog of the American Stock Exchange (the SEC) last November. The idea is in particular to know whether Elon Musk did not mislead investors by claiming that this innovation had made it possible to cure paralysis in a monkey.
In At the same time, Neuralink was singled out for animal abuse. Thus, a large majority of the monkeys used for the tests would have died following brain implant tests. For his part, Elon Musk affirmed that these animals were already sick, sometimes terminally ill, and that the operation had nothing to do with their death. The startup ended up admitting its wrongs in December 2022.
Subsequently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expressed concern about the migration of microwires to certain areas of the patient's brain, and was concerned about the possibility of removing the implant without damaging a patient's brain. user. Finally, the public agency validated a first test on a human last year.
We will therefore wait for Neuralink to say more about this first experiment, its concrete effects on the patient, and their longer-term state of health.
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