Tycoon Elon Musk is not content with electric cars, reaching for space or building underground tunnels to solve traffic problems. It also wants to enter our brain.
His company Neurotechnology, Neuralink, based in San Francisco, seeks to develop implants that can treat neural disorders such as Alzheimer's, dementia or spinal cord injuries . Musk showed a prototype of the device in a video on Friday, aimed at recruiting new employees.
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The billionaire called his presentation the "Three Little Pigs Show . " One of them, Gertrude, has had a coin-sized computer chip, about 23 millimeters in diameter, in her brain for two months. The Neuralink implant is placed in the part of the brain that controls Gertrude's snout.
Musk pointed out that the company had three pigs with two implants each . They are "healthy, happy and indistinguishable from a normal pig," he said.
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July 15, 202000: 28"I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn't know it," said the founder of the electric car company Tesla Motors and the private space exploration company SpaceX.
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The chip is designed to be implanted in a person's skull . Ultra-thin wires dangling from the device will go directly to the brain. In an earlier version, the device was worn behind one ear like a hearing aid.
But commercial start-up in humans is still a long way off. This would involve complex trials and approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), among many other things.
Neuroscientists unaffiliated with the company said the presentation indicated that Neuralink had made great progress, but warned that longer studies were needed.
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Hooking a brain directly to devices is not new. Doctors implant electrodes in the brains to provide stimulation in the treatment of conditions such as Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and chronic pain.
In experiments, implanted sensors have allowed paralytics to use brain signals to operate computers and move robotic arms. In 2016, researchers reported that a man regained some movement in his own hand with a brain implant.
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Musk's proposal aims to go beyond this. Neuralink wants to first use the device with people who have a severe spinal cord injury to help them speak, write and move using their brain waves.
"I am sure that in the long term it would be possible to restore movement to someone's whole body, " said Musk, famous for saying he wants to "die on Mars, but not on impact."
Neuralink is not the only company working on artificial intelligence for the brain. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who sold his previous Braintree payments company to PayPal for $ 800 million, founded Kernel in 2016, a company that works on "advanced neural interfaces" to treat disease and extend cognition.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also interested in the topic. Facebook bought CTRL-labs, a startup that develops non-invasive neural interfaces.
With information from The Associated Press and Reuters.