On February 10, PCRM, the American Association of Responsible Physicians, accused Musk's Neuralink brain-computer interface company and partners of "monkey abuse," which it said had obtained more than 600 pages of records showing 23 monkeys being subjected to invasive and lethal brain experiments.
According to a complaint filed Thursday by the American Association of Responsible Physicians (PCRM), Musk's brain chip company Neuralink caused terrible harm to the experimental monkeys tested.
The complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), relates to the Neuralink monkey experiment conducted at the University of California, Davis from 2017 to 2020.
Workers failed to provide adequate veterinary care to the monkeys, using unapproved substances to damage the monkeys' brains and cause their deaths. The monkeys used in the experiment had steel pillars nailed to their skulls, causing the monkeys to have seizures after being implanted, with recurrent infections at the implant site. Some monkeys were euthanized before they could be used for experiments because of deteriorating health.
Jeremy Beckham, PCRM's research advocacy coordinator, said: "These documents show that the monkeys' brains were mutilated in shoddy experiments and then tortured there until they died. No wonder Musk and the university didn't want photos and videos of this horrific atrocity to be seen by the public. ”
One of the monkeys was allegedly missing several fingers and toes, possibly due to "self-harm or other unidentified trauma" caused by the pain of the experiment, and the disabled monkey was eventually executed.
Another monkey with a hole in his skull and a wireless chip in his brain developed a hemorrhagic skin infection and was euthanized because he did not receive adequate care.
There is also a female macaque monkey, after being put into the wireless chip in the brain, there are severe vomiting, dry vomiting, wheezing and other symptoms. A few days later, transcripts stated that the macaque "fell to the ground due to exhaustion" and was subsequently executed. Autopsies showed severe cerebral hemorrhage in the monkeys.
Currently, Neuralink has not responded to this.
According to CCTV, in April last year, Neuralink published a video of monkeys playing video games with their own minds on social media. At the time, Musk said the long-term goal of the technology was to allow paralyzed people to use their phones through their minds.
It is understood that the monkey in this video is a 9-year-old macaque monkey who has always been named Pag, and was implanted with a brain-computer interface before the video was filmed.
Initially, the research team taught Pag to play games using a joystick and rewarded it with a banana shake fed through a metal straw. Brain-computer devices record which neurons are activated, modeling the relationship between Pag's neural activity and the expected direction of movement to achieve a "brain-computer connection."
The researchers then disconnected the joystick from the computer, and without the joystick, Pag controlled the cursor with only its mind and continued to play the game of ping-pong.
According to the data, the so-called "brain-computer interface" is to implant tiny electrodes in the brain and use electric currents to interact with brain cells.
In 2019, Musk released his first product, which is based on the principle of drilling holes in the skull with a laser, and then avoiding the cerebral blood vessels and implanting a line into the brain.
In August 2020, to verify the effects of the brain-computer interface, researchers implanted devices in the bodies of three pigs, and Musk showed viewers the real-time transmission of piglet brain activity during the live broadcast.