Officials with the Biden administration have reportedly kicked off a federal investigation into one of Elon Musk’s various companies over allegations that the company stands in violation of a number of animal-welfare laws.
This investigation into Neuralink, a company for which Musk sits as the CEO, was first kicked off by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General at the request of one federal prosecutor, expressed a report from Reuters.
The neurotechnology company is currently working on “ultra high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,” as explained by the company’s public website.
The report claimed that the investigation focuses on possible violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which “regulates the treatment of animals in research, teaching, testing, exhibition, transport, and by dealers,” as explained by the agency.
The report claims that “Neuralink treats animals quite well compared to other research facilities,” as explained via interviews with employees. Many executives at the company have spoken about building a “Monkey Disneyland” at one of the testing facilities while wanting the animals to live in a “monkey Taj Mahal” at a different site.
A small selection of employees for the company has reportedly made the claims that Musk is very insistent on pushing for faster and faster times in getting their products to the point that it can start carrying out tests on humans have ended up causing mistakes in the tests that have been carried out on animals such as pigs and monkeys.
These employees have alleged that the mistakes ended up leading to more animals needing to be killed due to failed surgeries and due to experiments needing to be carried out again. These animals often needed to be killed at the end of the experiments due to the need for post-mortem analysis in order to find out the overall effectiveness of the recent experiment.
A number of the mistakes that have reportedly been afflicting the experiments are very simple in their essence, such as implanting the entire wrong device or implanting a device at the wrong vertebra of the animal.
The news comes to light after Musk stated this past week that he currently is expecting the wireless brain chips for the company to enter clinical trials for humans within the next six months. The goal of the implants is to assist disabled people in being able to communicate and move.
“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human,” stated Musk. “The progress at first, particularly as it applies to humans, will seem perhaps agonizingly slow, but we are doing all of the things to bring it to scale in parallel. So, in theory, progress should be exponential.”
