Elon Musk's Neuralink under investigation by Biden admin over alleged animal welfare law violations
The investigation into Neuralink revolves around potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which “regulates the treatment of animals in research, teaching, testing, exhibition, transport, and by dealers.”
The Biden administration has launched a federal investigation into Elon Musk’s Neuralink over allegations that the company may have violated federal animal welfare laws.
Musk, who serves as Neuralink’s CEO, has been under fire for his takeover of Twitter and his decision to release the Twitter Files detailing the Biden campaign’s collusion with the social media platform to censor coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
Neuralink is a company dedicated to developing “ultra high bandwidth brian-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers,” per its website.
According to Reuters, an investigation was launched by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Inspector General following a request by a federal prosecutor.
The report claims that the investigation into Neuralink revolves around potential violations of the Animal Welfare Act, which “regulates the treatment of animals in research, teaching, testing, exhibition, transport, and by dealers.”
“Neuralink treats animals quite well compared to other research facilities,” Reuters reported, according to interviews with Neuralink researchers and employees. Company executives have gone on record to talk about building a “Monkey Disneyland” for their test subjects at one facility, allowing them to live in relative comfort. Another location constructed a “monkey Taj Mahal” for simian test subjects in waiting.
Reuters reports that due to strict time constraints, some mistakes have been made that led to monkeys in the tests having to be put down due to botched surgeries. However, as with any animal research, animals are often killed at the end of an experiment for post-mortem analysis.
The report of the investigation comes about a week after Musk announced Neuralink’s plans to enter human clinical trials on its wireless chips within the next six months, with the goal of helping disabled people regain use of their faculties.
“We want to be extremely careful and certain that it will work well before putting a device into a human,” Musk said. “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.”
There is no evidence that the animals were treated with neglect or tortured, as has been reported by the White Coat Waste Project on National Institutes of Health-funded programs on beagles.
As reported by Rebel News, dogs were subjected to cruel and unusual experiments, including an experiment in which six-to-seven month old beagle puppies were trained to wear a jacket filled with hypodermic needles that injected them full of cocaine.
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