Elon Musk has revealed a patient has become the first human to have a Neuralink microchip implanted into their brain.
The billionaire said on Monday night his startup Neuralink had successfully performed a craniectomy to attach the device in the unnamed person on Sunday.
He announced the product – called ‘Telepathy’ – and he hopes it will allow users with disabilities like Stephen Hawking to ‘communicate faster than an auctioneer’.
Musk said it will ‘enable control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking’.
It comes less than a year after Neuralink got Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance to operate on humans, a critical milestone for the startup.
Musk on Monday announced that the first person had received a Neuralink brain implant
Musk wrote on X on Monday night: ‘The first human received an implant from @Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well. Initial results show promising neuron spike detection.’
He said the device ‘enables control of your phone or computer, and through them almost any device, just by thinking.’
He added: ‘Initial users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs. Imagine if Stephen Hawking could communicate faster than a speed typist or auctioneer. That is the goal.’
The company aims to implant microchips into the brains of paralyzed people, and allow them to move their bodies using their thoughts.
Neuralink announced in September that it would soon commence a trial in humans, to evaluate the safety of its implant.
Details of the patient were not given, but Ashlee Vance, who wrote a 2015 biography, ‘Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future’, wrote in a Bloomberg report that the ideal candidate for Neuralink’s first human trial was ‘an adult under age 40 whose four limbs are paralyzed’.
Vance explained that it would take a ‘couple of hours’ for a surgeon to perform a craniectomy and a further 25 minutes for the chip to be inserted by a robot into the area of the brain which controls the hands, wrists and forearms.
‘The goal is to show that the device can safely collect useful data from that part of the patient’s brain, a key step in Neuralink’s efforts to convert a person’s thoughts into a range of commands a computer can understand,’ Vance added.
Vance said the implant would relay this information to a nearby laptop or tablet.
During the human trial, a robot developed by the company will surgically place the implants’ ‘ultra-fine’ threads that help transmit signals in participants’ brains, the company said.
Vance, who said he had visited Neuralink’s facilities 10 times in three years, also revealed how Musk had pushed his company to ward off the threat of similar brain-computer start-ups Synchron and Onward.
Both have already begun human trials, leading the billionaire to fume last year that the two companies were ‘currently kicking our a**’.
In response, he is said to have told Neuralink that it needed to pick up its pace ‘like the world is coming to an end’, according to Vance.
Reuters reported in June that the company was valued as high as $5 billion, based on private stock trades.
Neuralink has, however, been dogged by controversy in recent years, having sparked ethical concerns and drawn skepticism among neuroscientists and other experts.
Safety concerns meant the firm struggled for a while to gain the necessary approval for human trials, particularly with FDA.
Major issues involved the lithium battery of the device; the possibility of the implant’s wires migrating within the brain; and the challenge of safely extracting the device without damaging brain tissue.
The FDA later granted its approval in May but did not disclose how its initial concerns were resolved.
Despite the controversy, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Musk has grand ambitions for Neuralink, saying the company will facilitate speedy surgical insertions of its chip devices to treat conditions such as obesity, autism, depression and schizophrenia.
It could also allow for web browsing and telepathy.
However, even if the device proves to be safe for human use, it would still potentially take more than a decade for Neuralink to secure clearance to commercialize it, experts have cautioned.
Where it will go: The study will use a robot to surgically place a brain-computer interface (BCI) implant in a region of the brain that controls movement, Neuralink added. Pictured is a scan showing the implant in an animal’s brain
A monkey with the Neuralink chip implanted in their brain is seen playing a game
Experts say the brain implants will require extensive testing to overcome technical and ethical challenges if they are to become widely available.
Musk’s company – which was only founded in 2016 – has repeatedly overestimated the speed at which it deliver on its promises.
Initially Neuralink wanted to start inserting chips into humans in 2020, before putting this back to 2022. It has finally happened in 2024.
There was also a word of caution from one of the company’s executives in response to Musk’s demands.
Referencing the fate of SpaceX’s first few rocket launches, Shivon Zilis, Neuralink’s director of special projects and the mother of two of Musk’s children, told Vance: ‘We can’t blow up the first three. That’s not an option here.’
NEURALINK ‘BOTCHED EXPERIMENTS’ WITH MONKEYS – FORMER EMPLOYEE SAYS
‘Botched experiments’ by Elon Musk’s Neuralink allegedly ‘kept suffering animals alive for no reason and malpractice caused monkey’s brains to hemorrhage’ during rushed brain chip testing, a former Neuralink employee and internal lab notes have previously revealed.
The billionaire’s startup is accused of violating the Animal Welfare Act with its experiments at the University of California, Davis, from 2017 through 2020, which ‘sacrificed all the animals involved,’ a former Neuralink employee, who asked to remain anonymous, told DailyMail.com.
One case stood out to them – a monkey sacrificed ahead of schedule due to errors allegedly made during surgery.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a lawsuit against the University of California, Davis, where the experiments were held, claiming it has to hand over video footage and photographs of the experiments under California’s Public Records Act. Pictured is an image of a monkey shown on Neuralink’s website
DailyMail.com previously obtained Neuralink lab notes that detail how a sealant was placed on the surgical holes, causing the monkey’s brain to swell and hemorrhage.
‘There was no reason to use it,’ the former employee, who worked as a necropsy technician, told DailyMail.com.
This incident is among a laundry list of cases brought to light in recent months by former staff, which has led the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to open a federal investigation into Nueralink for animal-welfare violations.
Read more here.