Neuralink Safety Concerns Drove Co-Founder to Break Up With Elon Musk
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- May 07, 2024
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The patient reportedly remained healthy with no adverse results, but experts from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have urged Neuralink to halt all animal and human experiments and instead focus on non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.
The battle for brain supremacy
Precision Neuroscience, founded by Rapoport in 2021 after his departure from Neuralink, is focused on using surface microelectrodes that coat the brain's surface without penetrating it.
“For a medical device, safety often implies minimal invasiveness, and in the early days of brain-computer interfaces, there was this notion that in order to extract information-rich data from the brain, one needed to penetrate the brain with tiny little needle-like electrodes,” Rapaport said.
This is no longer the case, he added, outlining his new company's methods.
“At precision, the physical interface with the brain is a thin film about a quarter of the width of a human eyelash that conforms to the undulating surface of the brain,” Rapoport explained on the podcast. “And inside that thin film are embedded tiny little platinum micro electrodes, each one about the size of a neuron.”
These electrodes are arranged in a lattice pattern on the brain's surface, detecting electrical signals while filtering out noise, he said. The data is then compressed, transmitted externally, and translated into intelligible form by machine learning software calibrated to each individual's unique brain signals.
While Neuralink's approach may offer access to a larger trove of neural data, Precision Neuroscience's method could mitigate the risks associated with invasive procedures, Rappoport asserted.
The two-time neurotech founder said he is optimistic about the overall potential of brain-computer interfaces, calling them a “platform technology” that could enable new applications in different fields as interfaces improve. BCIs will start becoming more common for medical patients in the next few years and could eventually change the way healthy people interact with computers, too, according to Rapoport.
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