Can chipped pigs help cure humans?
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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk鈥檚 neuroscience startup Neuralink on Friday unveiled a pig named Gertrude that has had a coin-sized computer chip in its brain for two months, showing off an early step toward the goal of curing human diseases with the same type of implant.
Co-founded by Tesla Inc and SpaceX CEO Musk in 2016, San Francisco Bay Area-based Neuralink aims to implant wireless brain-computer interfaces that include thousands of electrodes in the most complex human organ to help cure neurological conditions like Alzheimer鈥檚, dementia and spinal cord injuries and ultimately fuse humankind with artificial intelligence.
鈥淎n implantable device can actually solve these problems,鈥 Musk said on a webcast on Friday, mentioning ailments such as memory loss, hearing loss, depression and insomnia.
Musk did not provide a timeline for those treatments, appearing to retreat from earlier statements that human trials would begin by the end of this year. Neuralink鈥檚 first clinical trials with a small number of human patients would be aimed at treating paralysis or paraplegia, the company鈥檚 head surgeon Dr Matthew MacDougall said.
Neuroscientists unaffiliated with the company said the presentation indicated that Neuralink had made great strides but cautioned that longer studies were needed.
Musk presented what he described as the 鈥渢hree little pigs demo.鈥 Gertrude, the pig with a Neuralink implant in the part of its brain that controls the snout, required some coaxing by Musk to appear on camera, but eventually began eating off of a stool and sniffing straw, triggering spikes on a graph tracking the animal鈥檚 neural activity.
Musk said the company had three pigs with two implants each, and also revealed a pig that previously had an implant. They were 鈥渉ealthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig .:. The company predicted a pig鈥檚 limb movement during a treadmill run at 鈥渉igh accuracy鈥 using implant data.
Musk described Neuralink鈥檚 chip, roughly 23 millimeters in diameter, as 鈥渁 Fitbit (activity tracker) in your skull.鈥
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