Shocked, I tell you! Federal investigtors have yet another probe of an Elon Musk company, Neuralink. Reuters interviewed 20 employees who are dissatisfied with animal testing. Staff members say testing is rushed, causing needless suffering for animals.
Where is the federal probe of SBF?
“Neuralink Corp is developing a brain implant it hopes will help paralyzed people walk again and cure other neurological ailments. The federal probe, which has not been previously reported, was opened in recent months by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General at the request of a federal prosecutor, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The probe, one of the sources said, focuses on violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which governs how researchers treat and test some animals,” Reuters reports.
It’s not as if they injected the animals with Pfizer’s vaccine. They had humans for those experiments.
“Reuters could not determine the full scope of the federal investigation or whether it involved the same alleged problems with animal testing identified by employees in Reuters interviews.”
In all, the company has killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys, following experiments since 2018. Some rats and mice died also. That is typical of this type of research and means nothing in of itself as Reuters indicates.
Earlier this year, Mr. Musk sent staffers a news article about Swiss researchers who developed an electrical implant that helped a paralyzed man to walk again. “We could enable people to use their hands and walk again in daily life!” he wrote to staff at 6:37 a.m. Pacific Time on Feb. 8. Ten minutes later, he followed up: “In general, we are simply not moving fast enough. It is driving me nuts!”
The company frequently misses deadlines, so one has to wonder how efficient the employees are.
THE PIGS WHO DIED
According to Reuters, in one example, staff at Neuralink accidentally implanted a device on the wrong vertebra of two pigs.
Company veterinarian Sam Baker advised his colleagues to kill one of the pigs to end her suffering immediately.
“Based on the low chance of full recovery … and her current poor psychological well-being, it was decided that euthanasia was the only appropriate course of action,” Baker wrote colleagues about one of the pigs a day after the surgery, adding a broken heart emoji.
Baker did not comment on the incident.
Staff claim Musk moved too quickly. There’s a difference of opinion about whether they perform surgeries unnecessarily.
When employees expressed concerns, the company held a town hall in September to explain its processes.
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