This sick little monkey "readily ate apricots." That bad little monkey got none. An upset little monkey was "holding hands" with her "buddy" in the next-door cage, calmer after having some Valium, but still pulling on her brain-electrode port.
These are details from a 700-page trove of veterinary reports — released by opponents of animal research — about the rhesus macaque monkeys used for research by Elon Musk's Neuralink, a "brain-machine interface" company with an animal-testing lab in Fremont, California.
The firm, founded in San Francisco in 2016, is implanting electrodes into the monkeys' brains in what it says is a bid to overcome paralysis and neurological disorders in people — and eventually allow computer-enhanced humans to if that technology surpasses human capabilities.
While animal research is highly secretive, in part because of its controversial nature, an animal welfare group opposed to such studies has provided a rare look from the inside, by using freedom-of-information law to obtain veterinary reports from a university that detail Neuralink's research.
Musk's notoriety is drawing attention to the group's cause. But it is not clear from the release how six-year-old Neuralink — whose accomplishments have impressed some researchers, and which has not been cited by federal overseers — compares to other players in animal testing.
The group insists the company is out of line. The records "reveal a troubling pattern of monkeys suffering from chronic systemic infections resulting from their crude surgeries ... and evidence that monkeys are suffering from extreme psychological distress," it said in a complaint to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which regulates animal-testing labs.
As is typical of descriptions of animal research, much of the material in the reports is highly disturbing, showing that monkeys suffered from frequent bacterial infections, missing digits, oozing wounds, bloody digestive disorders and stress behaviors including refusing to eat. The animals are dosed with drugs from a list of 40 pharmaceuticals that includes opiate painkillers such as fentanyl, ketamine, tranquilizers, anti-inflammatories, antibiotics and pentobarbital for euthanasia, the reports show. One monkey's death was linked to glue that seeped onto its brain.
"What you see time and again is instances of animals suffering often for days or months," said Ryan Merkley, director of research advocacy for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the animal-welfare group that obtained the reports. "It is a picture of consistent and chronic mismanagement of basic animal-welfare standards."
Neuralink's research protocol acknowledges the work has "potential to cause more than momentary pain or distress" to the monkeys. Federal law allows suffering in research animals, under certain conditions, and the USDA has found no violations in its inspections of Neuralink's facilities, agency records show.
Still, the allegations by the doctor's group have put Musk — Neuralink's CEO, who in the same role at Tesla has become well known for his defiance of government rules and regulations — at the center of another regulatory controversy. Neither the company nor Musk responded to requests for a response to the report.
In a issued in response to the doctors' group's actions, Neuralink described its research practices in detail, and said it was "absolutely committed to working with animals in the most humane and ethical way possible," and that "it is our responsibility as caretakers to ensure that their experience is as peaceful and frankly, as joyful as possible."
UC Davis spokesman Andy Fell said in a statement that the university's Primate Center — which keeps 4,000 monkeys for breeding and research — housed Neuralink's monkeys until 2020, with staff providing veterinary care including "round-the-clock monitoring."
"We strive to provide the best possible care to animals in our charge," Fell said, adding that the university "follows all applicable laws and regulations."
Merkley, from the doctors group, alleged that an industry-friendly USDA fails to properly oversee animal research, especially after the agency narrowed its inspection process in 2019. A spokesperson for the agency, Andre Bell, said this week that the USDA takes "animal neglect and abuse very seriously."
Neuralink's surgically implants hair-like electrode threads into monkeys' brains. The animals get extra food and treats for "correct" behavior, the protocol said, but when performing "incorrectly," the reward is "withheld." Company promotional material claims the implants, put into humans, would let paralyzed people control computers and mobile devices, to communicate more easily using text or artificial speech.
The research appears to have had some success. An April 2021 suggests that a monkey implanted with two of the company's brain electrodes was able to play a computer game using its mind alone. And researchers said in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Medical Internet Research that "Elon Musk and Neuralink have successfully addressed the major issues hampering the next generation of invasive brain-computer interface," and that the technology could potentially restore brain connections severed by diseases such as Alzheimer's.
Neuralink — which has posted numerous jobs for an apparent new animal-research facility in Austin, Texas, including for specialists in studying cadavers — had 22 monkeys at UC Davis, and the doctors group believes 15 died there, with seven moved to Neuralink's lab in a Fremont office park in December 2020. Reports from the USDA suggest Neuralink brought more monkeys to Fremont and had 13 at that site in February 2021; by January of this year, there were 12, according to the agency's last inspection.
Merkley argued that Neuralink's research goals could be achieved without the implants, citing recent work that succeeded in allowing paralyzed people to use their minds to move on-screen cursors and a robotic arm via non-invasive methods.
Neuralink is not alone in conducting problematic experiments, with issues commonly arising in research that relies on "chronic instrumentation" inside animals' bodies, Merkley said.
"You see similar problems whether it's dogs with implanted cardiac devices," he said, "or monkeys with devices implanted in their heads."
