It took a little longer than promised, but Elon Musk confirmed this Monday that a human has received a chip implant in the brain for the first time.
“He is recovering well,” said the businessman when announcing the news on X, the social network.
“Initial results show promising detection of neuronal electrical impulses,” he adds.
The surgical procedure was performed by Neuralink, one of the companies owned by Musk.
At this time, the age or identity of the patient is not known.
Musk has made the technological and scientific advance seem like a marketing milestone.
“Neuralink's first product is called Telepathy,” said the businessman.
This will serve to be able to control with thought the telephone and computer of the patient who has received the implant.
“The first users will be those who have lost the use of their limbs.
Imagine if Stephen Hawking had communicated faster than a stenographer or an auctioneer.
That is the goal,” the entrepreneur reported.
The company began recruiting patients for the experiments, which last six years, in September.
The patients would be part of PRIME, a program that summarizes the company's objectives, the precise implantation of a chip (Precise Robotically Implanted Brain Computer Interface) in the brain.
In its first major presentation to the public, the company assured that the implant, “cosmetically invisible,” would allow the control of a cursor or a keyboard using “only thoughts.”
Neuralink's goal was to focus on quadriplegics with spinal injuries or people who have been suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS, for at least a year.
Those chosen had to be over 22 years old and have a nurse or guard on a continuous basis.
They would be rewarded with financial support to travel to the sites where the clinical tests would be carried out in the 18 months of the first stage.
The big reward, however, would be a radical change in their lives that would be brought about by a chip implanted in the part of the brain that controls the intention to move.
The semiconductor records neural activity through 1,024 electrodes distributed across 64 wires, each thinner than a human hair.
Neuralink
Neuralink obtained the green light from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the pharmaceutical regulator, in May 2023 to carry out the intervention in humans.
Achieving FDA approval was an essential requirement for the historic step that Musk announced this afternoon to be taken.
Health authorities had rejected the first request, made in 2022, showing certain doubts about the safety of the lithium battery included in the semiconductor, which is the size of a 25-cent coin.
The government agency's experts also wanted to know then whether the cables coming out of the brain could disturb or damage other areas within the skull.
The Neuralink team, a company founded in 2016, corrected the FDA's observations in record time and against the opinion of experts who were skeptical of the procedure.
“Neuralink does not seem to have the experience or the mentality necessary to launch this on the market soon,” a neural engineer had told the British agency Reuters in March of last year.
The company was in a race to beat its competitor, Paradromics, an Austin, Texas-based company that had developed similar technology that allows paralyzed patients to regain some abilities.
In 2021, the company published a video of a monkey playing
Pong
, the Atari console video game, which copied the dynamics of table tennis.
The images of the primate became a viral sensation that had more than six million views.
For the first time, the company was able to clearly communicate how its implant could revolutionize the future.
The novelty was not that the primate, called
Pager
, interacted with the game, but that he did so by controlling the controller with his brain after two chips had been implanted six months earlier.
Elon Musk announced at the end of 2022 that Neuralink would begin human testing in mid-2023. Today they are a reality, according to the controversial disruptor.
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