that some employees had grown concerned about the animal experiments being rushed under pressure from Musk to speed development, causing needless suffering and deaths of pigs, sheep and monkeys.
Neuralink shareholders could see big gains if the private company’s valuation, currently more than $1 billion, continues to soar. Successful animal trials are critical for the company to gain federal approval for human trials and, ultimately, brain-implant commercialization. Reutersthat the U.S. Food and Drug Administration rejected Neuralink’s first human-trial application, in part because the company had not proven the device’s safety in animal tests.
UC Davis declined to comment on Neuralink’s new oversight board but said in a statement that its conflict-of-interest rules prohibit “interested” parties from voting or “influencing decisions” on such panels. The USDA has interpreted the rule narrowly, the experts and former agency officials said. The agency, they said, rarely flags a conflict unless an IACUC member votes to approve a particular experiment the member is also directly running as a company employee. Beyond that, the USDA allows a range of potential conflicts that would never be permitted in human trials, which are overseen by other federal agencies that have similar conflict-of-interest regulations, the experts said.
The joint probe is examining the agency’s oversight of Neuralink and of animal welfare more broadly. The investigation follows a long history of USDA OIG reports, including three since 2014, blasting the agency’s animal-welfare enforcement as ineffective. One issue is a stretched staff: The USDA employs 122 inspectors to inspect 11,785 facilities, ranging from zoos and breeders to labs, according to a Congressional Research Service report last July.
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