Here are details on the grisly deaths of Elon Musk’s Neuralink monkeys

September 21, 2023 6:52 AM

Elon Musk denied claims that Neuralink’s monkey test subjects died as a result of its brain implants — but Wired points out some documents that suggest otherwise. On Tuesday, Neuralink announced it’s starting in-human trials for people with quadriplegia. Letters sent to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. [Content Warning: descriptions of animal abuse/cruelty]
posted by Fizz (46 comments total)

:( Glad Wired's journalists are on this. I physically can't click on the story because even just hearing the overview of the deaths last time in the press was a kind of cruelty that I couldn't forget about for days. Just a warning to anyone else who thinks they might have a similar constitution.
posted by earthstarvoyager at 6:55 AM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

I honestly don't know what it'll take for investors/media/techbro-pisslords to realize that Elon is just a piece of shit huckster who has no business expertise or any clue as to what he's doing and is just a giant baby with too much money and privilege. But it's 2023 and these assholes only seem to fail upwards.

*sighs*
posted by Fizz at 6:58 AM on September 21, 2023 [24 favorites]

It’s real bad.

People have done this kind of surgery before, on humans even, without all this infection, pain and distress, but it’s Elon so it’s got to be both botched and hyped to hell and back.
posted by Artw at 7:01 AM on September 21, 2023 [18 favorites]

You first, Elon.
posted by azpenguin at 7:04 AM on September 21, 2023 [33 favorites]

Elon claimed that the monkeys were already sick, which Luke O'Neil described as "going to the terminally ill ape store and double checking that they're all terminally ill one last time with the terminally ill ape salesman before buying them all up and torturing their brains." Neither a PR nor a scientific triumph, if it were true, which it doesn't appear to have been.

I don't know if a human undergoing an actual Scanners-type explosion would be enough to start the machinery to dislodge Elon from where he sits at the top of his various companies, but I am afraid we may have to find out.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:10 AM on September 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

Musk is being disingenuous. He was claiming the test subjects didn't die from his implants, because they were already dying of unrelated afflictions when the implants were put in. Terrible.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:11 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

They died with Neuralink. Not of Neuralink.

(It's so dark and so funny. I don't know who came up with it first, but it wasn't me)
posted by MengerSponge at 7:16 AM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

A very weird tangent, but Bethesda's recent space RPG Starfield has a questline for a corporation called Ryujin Industries and without getting into too many specific spoilers, it broadly explores brain implants and evil corporate espionage. There are major story beats that now has me wondering if the writers were directly commenting on Elon. Or maybe its just easy to assume an evil technology focused corporation would engage in this kind of shit b/c *gestures at our own world in 2023*.
posted by Fizz at 7:27 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

He was claiming the test subjects didn't die from his implants, because they were already dying of unrelated afflictions when the implants were put in.

Truly, this is peak Elon. It appears to be both bullshit and a lie!
posted by The Bellman at 7:29 AM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

I honestly don't know what it'll take for investors/media/techbro-pisslords to realize that Elon is just a piece of shit huckster who has no business expertise or any clue as to what he's doing and is just a giant baby with too much money and privilege.

I was at the EFF's Mastodon panel at DragonCon this year, and one of the presenters went out of his way at the beginning to both-sides Elon's track record, saying he's done bad and good things. I got the impression that he was an advisor to venture capitalists? He was okay in the panel, but that opening was a really sour note for me. I think it's a case where there's an insular culture of money people, and they have their own internal dialogues, and it enables these kinds of terrible opinions to fester.
posted by JHarris at 8:01 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I usually get a chuckle off the latest Elon hi jinks, but this is fucking grim.
posted by slogger at 8:04 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is a general position that certain people should be denied the possession of firearms. I think similar thought needs to extend to certain people not having access to large amounts of money.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:26 AM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

Elon is the worst possible application of "move fast and break things" to the real world.
posted by signal at 8:27 AM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think it's a case where there's an insular culture of money people, and they have their own internal dialogues, and it enables these kinds of terrible opinions to fester.

The term we may be looking for is 'class solidarity'.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:29 AM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Very slender silver lining: at least Lone Skum's tendency to fuck things up extends to creating the Borg Collective.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:56 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

Elon's compulsion to be the Coolest Guy on the Internet of 1999 has gone from "worrying" to "horrifying".
posted by BetaRayBiff at 9:09 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

For a while, there was one of those full-sized side-of-the-bus ads here in Austin that showed a picture of a monkey in distress and called out Elon Musk specifically for harming animals.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:26 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

speaking as a researcher in the field:

this makes me sick.
posted by Dashy at 9:41 AM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

I feel like the content warning for this should be even more severely worded. Oh God that is horrifying.
posted by newdaddy at 9:52 AM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

there was a report on the news last night that they were looking to start human based trials, and only mentioned the monkeys dying four sentences in. I wouldn't trust Elon to toast a piece of bread, much less make a working brain chip
posted by jazon at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

It's funny you should mention trusting Elon Musk to use a toaster, jazon...
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:05 AM on September 21, 2023 [8 favorites]

Very slender silver lining: at least Lone Skum's tendency to fuck things up extends to creating the Borg Collective.

For all we know, the Borg happened in spite of him and would have assimilated the entire galaxy if they hadn't started charging people to access the Collective.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:16 AM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

I, personally, am glad so many people are working so hard to create the Torment Nexus.
posted by scolbath at 10:21 AM on September 21, 2023 [13 favorites]

this is especially to Dashy, I guess — isn’t this not merely bullshit and a lie but self defeating? Doing research in organisms already seriously sick with anything but what you’re trying to fix would make the results very hard to interpret, wouldn’t it?
posted by clew at 10:22 AM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Ah, so Musk is heading into his Josef Mengele phase.

Does this guy even have a bottom-of-the-barrel?
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:36 AM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Billionaires are dangerous and should be taxed out of existence.
posted by notyou at 10:44 AM on September 21, 2023 [14 favorites]

HOW did the company get FDA approval for human testing to commence?
posted by Faintdreams at 11:13 AM on September 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

Money?
posted by signal at 11:17 AM on September 21, 2023

I'm guessing, without knowing the details: a rogue lab, no disclosures, no certifications, cheapest option, and the FDA hasn't caught up yet.
posted by Slackermagee at 11:36 AM on September 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm guessing, without knowing the details: a rogue lab, no disclosures, no certifications, cheapest option, and the FDA hasn't caught up yet.

This is the future the extreme right wants.
posted by slogger at 11:41 AM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Oh wow it was a UC lab? Jesus Christ what went wrong to enable this from that system?
posted by Slackermagee at 11:42 AM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

There are major story beats that now has me wondering if the writers were directly commenting on Elon.

I'm reminded now of the (apparently well-attested) assertion that the character of Miles Bron in the movie Glass Onion was just supposed to be a generic techbro parody, but by the time it was actually released, Musk had himself become such an exemplar of that whole not-as-smart-as-they-think-they-are type that it seemed to be about him specifically.
posted by jackbishop at 11:56 AM on September 21, 2023 [9 favorites]

Twain had just the right words for Musk:

"I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pains which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. It is so distinctly a matter of feeling with me, and is so strong and so deeply-rooted in my make and constitution, that I am sure I could not even see a vivisector vivisected with anything more than a sort of qualified satisfaction. I do not say I should not go and look on; I only mean that I should almost surely fail to get out of it the degree of contentment which it ought, of course, to be expected to furnish."
posted by dsword at 11:56 AM on September 21, 2023 [20 favorites]

It's just one ED 209 after the other with this fucking idiot.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 12:15 PM on September 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yes, it appears the work was done at the UCDavis Primate Center, which doesn't have the best track record in animal care.
posted by foonly at 12:22 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Oh wow it was a UC lab?

That got my attention, too. Per the article, UC Davis' collaboration with Neuralink ended in 2020, though it doesn't say why. All the evidence from the veterinary records described in the article is pre-2020, presumably because Davis has a somewhat functioning IUCAC keeping records. I really wonder about Davis' role in this... and I shudder to think what other horrors happened when Neuralink was left to their own devices.
posted by Westringia F. at 12:29 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just out of curiosity -- if we're still doing fundraisers, what would it cost to have a week with no Musk or Trump posts at all?
posted by jzb at 12:47 PM on September 21, 2023 [11 favorites]

The sentiment is nice, but I think that could only be enforceable by removing posts after people made them. And what if something big happened during it? The absence of Last Week Tonight during the writer's strike has been pretty bad, but we won't be able to make fun of Musk here either?
posted by JHarris at 3:06 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Much as I'd love to go a day without hearing about either of those shitweasels, they're actively dangerous to the human population and we probably need to be aware of what horrible shittiness they erupt with, especially in the event of insurrection or god knows what else.

(At least Kanye's mostly shut up and wandering around Italy with his fake wife doing creepy shit...which isn't great, but for once he's being quiet.)
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:35 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile we've got corporations forcibly removing functional implants from people who desperately want to keep them.

A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.

More detail with the MIT Tech Review here.

Previously on metafilter: Argus implants promised vision to a small group of patients, but now that the company has gone silent, no one knows what to do. At least one patient resorted to cannibalizing spare parts, but things clearly can't last..
posted by Jilder at 4:39 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Ugh. The Wired thing was horrible and I can't unread it.

No way is euthanizing primates after a study normal. The terminal disease thing is a weak excuse. I can have an emotional response to animal studies that is different than my intellectual response, but IME even colleagues who do animal studies get very upset and emotional when they learn it caused suffering or death in their "large animal" studies.

HOW did the company get FDA approval for human testing to commence?

I'm guessing, without knowing the details: a rogue lab, no disclosures, no certifications, cheapest option, and the FDA hasn't caught up yet.

I'd love to know details too, though per the Wired article, FDA delayed authorization for over a year, asking for the company to address various risks. A year is quite a long delay for an investigational trial, and would show the FDA was paying at least some attention and, if it cheers you up, you can imagine a lot of people at Neuralink being very angry at the FDA (and also yelling at their own regulatory affairs officer.)

It's possible that there were simply more animal tests showing they could add and remove the chip safely. The ones in the Wired article happened in 2019. Putting electrodes in the brain is apparently not novel, so for the purpose of research the FDA might not need to see much more than that.
posted by mark k at 5:20 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

The terrifying thing is that to Elon and his enablers the rest of us are all monkeys in a lab.
posted by roolya_boolya at 5:30 PM on September 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

but with money
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:38 PM on September 21, 2023

Musk needs to be stopped.
posted by abucci at 5:43 PM on September 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, but how, and who can stop him short of death? He can pretty much do what he wants with impunity because money. Literally our only saving grace is he can't run for president.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:55 PM on September 21, 2023

That Wired story, my god. Here's an essential non-gruesome quote from the article about procedures Musk is lying about:

Shown a copy of Musk’s remarks on X about Neuralink’s animal subjects being “close to death already,” a former Neuralink employee alleges to WIRED that the claim is “ridiculous,” if not a “straight fabrication.” “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed,” they say. The ex-employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, says that up to a year’s worth of behavioral training was necessary for the program, a time frame that would exempt subjects already close to death.
posted by mediareport at 7:29 AM on September 23, 2023 [2 favorites]