Elon Musk’s lack of transparency in updates about his brain implant company Neuralink flouts scientific and ethical norms, raises questions about patient safety and risks setting back the entire field of neurotechnology, experts told Forbes, after the billionaire“What truly puzzles me about this is not the technology itself but the way of communicating scientific news,” said Marcello Ienca, a professor of ethics of AI and neuroscience at Technical University of Munich, who stressed information...
It “seems to sidestep the established protocols that underpin scientific integrity,” Ienca said, preventing experts from evaluating or understanding “the full scope and impact” of any claimed advances. “A tweet is not exactly a peer-reviewed scientific report,” said L. Syd M Johnson, an ethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities, adding that Musk’s brief update gave few details on the patient’s recovery, what degree of control they have over the mouse or whether “mouse” actually meant the onscreen cursor.
Most clinical trials are also registered in the public database ClinicalTrials.gov for the sake of transparency, accountability and the benefit of science, said Laura Cabrera, a neuroethicist at Pennsylvania State University’s Rock Ethics Institute, who called for the creation of “more rigorous ways” to hold companies operating in the space accountable, transparent and to make them follow similar reporting standards to federally funded trials.
While it isn’t illegal for Neuralink to not have registered its clinical trial, Ienca said not doing so “violates fundamental ethical guidelines for biomedical research”—notably the Declaration of Helsinki, a cornerstone statement of ethical principles for medical research involving humans—adding that Neuralink hasn’t communicated setting up any internal ethics board or establishing its own code of ethics and has not engaged in any major activities from policy organizations working in the space...
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