Did monkeys suffer for Elon Musk's fantasies of the future?
On the surface, the goals of Elon Musk’s Neuralink - to treat neurological disorders and restore senses and movement in humans - seem noble. But macaque monkeys have suffered untold miseries, and it’s clear that neither Musk nor Neuralink are telling the whole story. Claire Hamlett reports.
Documents obtained by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) have revealed the extreme suffering of monkeys used in experiments at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), as part of research for Elon Musk’s brain-chip company Neuralink. PCRM has filed a complaint with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) against UC Davis for carrying out “invasive and deadly brain experiments” on 23 monkeys, 15 of whom reportedly died, between 2017 and 2020.
Macaque monkeys had holes drilled into their skulls to implant electrodes in their brains as part of Neuralink’s development of a “brain-machine interface.” The complaint argues that more than 600 pages of documents obtained from UC Davis show that Neuralink and UC Davis staff violated the federal Animal Welfare Act by failing to provide dying monkeys with adequate veterinary care, killing monkeys with an unapproved substance known as “Bioglue”, and failing to protect the monkeys from psychological suffering. Monkeys were caged alone and suffered “debilitating health effects” after having implants in their brains. One monkey was put down after developing a skin infection while another had fingers and toes missing, “possibly from self-mutilation or some other unspecified trauma,” and was also put down.
Neuralink, which gave UC Davis over $1.4 million to carry out the experiments, is trying to develop a neural implant that would “help people with paralysis to regain independence through the control of computers and mobile devices.” It claims that the technology “has the potential to treat a wide range of neurological disorders, to restore sensory and movement function, and eventually to expand how we interact with each other, with the world, and with ourselves.”
Helping to restore movement, speech, and feeling to people with paralysis and neurological conditions is of course a worthy and important endeavour. But the revelation of what is being done to animals to achieve this goal is a damning indictment of Musk’s saviour complex and the hero-worship he so often receives, as well as the misleading nature of Neuralink’s promotional material. In addition, UC Davis already seems to have a poor track record when it comes to the treatment of lab animals, at least according to PETA, highlighting the flaws in procedures meant to safeguard the welfare of lab animals and calling into question whether animals are being used even more frequently than the law should allow.
Musk has long been perceived as a Tony Stark figure, a genius billionaire with big world-saving ideas. This doesn’t mean he never gets called out for wrongdoing, but he hardly suffers any consequences and gets excused for being terrible because he is, according to some, too important for humanity. The effects of this can be seen in how he gets away with making claims without any real scrutiny, such as when he said Gertrude, a pig who allegedly had a Neuralink chip in her brain, was “healthy and happy” and “loving life”.
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Newspapers repeated his words without ever bothering to ask how Musk could know that the pig was happy or whether it was right for animals to be subjected to experiments by a company with no public accountability. Last year, a video of a monkey apparently playing a video game with his mind through a Neuralink implant was similarly reported without much critical reflection. The BBC at least took animal welfare into consideration, quoting Dr Katy Taylor, director of science and regulatory affairs at Cruelty Free International, as saying: "It beggars belief that animals are being used in this type of grotesque curiosity-driven experiment.”
The documents obtained by PCRM revealing the intense suffering of monkeys being used by UC Davis and Neuralink expose why it’s a mistake to take Musk at his word and to not ask questions whenever animals are being used for human ends. Neuralink’s promotional videos and material have helped to encourage this idea that the animals it uses are all having a great time and are very well cared for. But what they show the public is what Neuralink wants it to see. In its analysis of the documents from UC Davis, PCRM states that “experimenters involved in this protocol unambiguously deviated from the approved protocol” for the experiments, for example in using “Bioglue” during a procedure, and that the use of Bioglue was only revealed in a subsequent necropsy, “indicating poor and possibly non-compliant recordkeeping by lab personnel.” This makes it difficult to take at face value Neuralink’s claims, made in a statement released today in response to PCRM’s complaint, about why and how the monkeys came to be in the condition they were in.
Testing on animals is a legal requirement for new medical devices and treatments in the US and in many other countries. But just because researchers currently have no choice but to use animals to advance medical research, this doesn’t mean there are no limits to what the animals can be forced to endure, nor that every experiment is justified by the ends, no matter how noble they might be. When it’s unclear that the procedures were even ‘necessary’, or it appears they were overly experimental, it shatters whatever justification exists to use animals, as may be the case at this stage of Neuralink’s research.
The progress Neuralink is making and how close it is to being able to move to human trials of its neural implants is not only unclear - it seems to have been overblown by Musk himself. Some neuroscientists are sceptical about what Neuralink can deliver, while one science writer, reporting on the Neuralink pig demo in 2020 wrote that, “Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them” and “It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all.” Indeed, Musk has his own agenda when it comes to which of the world’s problems to solve with technology like neural implants (namely the threat he perceives from artificial intelligence). Are Neuralink and UC Davis being approved to carry out horrible experiments on animals based mainly on Musk’s personal fears and capitalist fantasies about the future?
The revelations brought to light by PCRM certainly indicate that something is wrong in the labs of UC Davis and Neuralink. Now it’s up to the USDA to do its job properly and get to the bottom of these apparent horrific animal welfare abuses.
Claire Hamlett is a freelance journalist, writer and regular contributor at Surge. Based in Oxford, UK, Claire tells stories that challenge systemic exploitation of and disregard for animals and the environment and that point to a better way of doing things.
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