Elon Musk's brain implant company Neuralink was fined for violating the Department of Transportation's (DOT) rules regarding the movement of hazardous materials, according to records from the federal agency reviewed by Reuters.
During inspections of the company's facilities in Texas and California in February 2023, DOT investigators found the company had failed to register itself as a transporter of hazardous material, the agency's records show.
They also found improper packaging of hazardous waste, including the flammable liquid Xylene. Xylene can cause headaches, dizziness, confusion, loss of muscle coordination and even death, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Related: Brain CONTROL: Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink looking for brain implant trial volunteers.)
DOT fined the company a total of $2,480, an amount lower than what was initially assessed because the company agreed to fix the problems, the records show.
Reuters reviewed the records detailing the violations from the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an advocacy group that opposes the use of animals in medical research. PCRM obtained the documents through an open records request.
The records do not say why Neuralink would need to transport hazardous materials or whether any harm resulted from the violations.
Neuralink received U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance last year for its first trial to test the company's implant in humans, a critical milestone for the startup. Reuters reported in June that the company was valued as high as $5 billion, based on private stock trades.
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Neuralink announced in September that the trial opens new tab and will evaluate the safety of its implant for enabling people with paralysis to control external devices with their thoughts.
During the study, a robot developed by the company will surgically place the implants' "ultra-fine" threads that help transmit signals in participants' brains, the company said.
The DOT inquiry was launched last year after Reuters reported that Neuralink employees made internal complaints about animal experiments being rushed, causing needless suffering and deaths.
Neuralink's experiments killing hundreds of animal test subjects
Neuralink, which aims to develop a brain chip implant that it claims one day could help paralyzed people walk and blind people see, has been testing its technology on animals, killing some 1,500 since 2018 — employee whistleblowers have said the experiments are going horribly wrong.
In a 2019 incident, a Neuralink surgeon used a sealant to close holes drilled into a monkey's skull that had not been approved by the animal research oversight panel, according to emails and public records obtained by the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM), an animal-welfare advocacy group.
The complaint that triggered an inspection was in February 2022 by PCRM against Neuralink and the University of California, Davis, which was collaborating with the company at the time. It alleged the company carried out deadly experiments on 23 monkeys between 2017 and 2020.
Since then, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General, at the request of a federal prosecutor, has been investigating potential animal welfare violations amid internal Neuralink employee complaints about its animal testing experiments.
Through interviews and internal documents spanning several years, Reuters identified four experiments involving 86 pigs and two monkeys that were marred by human errors. The mistakes weakened the experiments' research value and required the tests to be repeated, leading to more animals being killed.
"Neuralink's violations once again reveal the company's sloppy, unsafe practices," said Ryan Merkley, PCRM's director of research advocacy.
PCRM had written to DOT last year to say that in 2019, Neuralink may have transported brain implants used in its monkey experiments without proper containment measures. The implants may have been contaminated with antibiotic-resistant staphylococcus and herpes B virus, the group said.
DOT found no evidence that Neuralink had shipped anything containing an infectious substance, according to the new records reviewed by Reuters.
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