Thousands of Americans have expressed a desire to insert a chip from Elon Musk into their brains: operations will begin next year

Thousands of people have expressed interest in receiving one of Neuralink's brain implants, reports Insider.

Photo: IStock

Ashley Vance, one of the biographers of American entrepreneur, engineer and billionaire Elon Musk, said he visited Neuralink facilities 10 times in three years. The company has not yet implanted its device in a person, but plans to operate on 11 people next year and more than 22 by 000, Vance said in the report.

Earlier this year, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave Neuralink permission to begin human trials of its device. Musk co-founded the company in 2016.

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“It's like a Fitbit with little wires in your skull,” Musk said of the device.

Earlier in March, the FDA rejected Neuralink's application to conduct human trials due to safety concerns. This includes the fact that the wires connected to the brain chip may move around inside the subject's head and that the chip may overheat.

“Manic sense of urgency”

The company began recruiting for its first human trial in September. Neuralink said in a blog post that it was looking for people who had quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The company says it hopes to eventually make a device that creates a kind of symbiosis between humans and machines, allowing people to send messages or play games using only their thoughts. But first, the company hopes to help people with neurological disorders.

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Vance, author of the 2015 biography “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” said in his report that despite “a surge of interest from thousands of potential patients,” the company was still looking for its first volunteer or “someone who wants a surgeon to remove a piece of his skull so a large robot can insert a series of electrodes and ultra-thin wires into his brain.”

Musk's biographer said it would take a surgeon "a couple of hours" to perform the craniectomy, and then about 25 minutes for robots to insert the device along with its ultra-thin array of about 64 threads. He said the device will replace the removed part of the skull. Vance added that these threads were approximately one-fourteenth the width of one human hair.

Elon Musk reveal the #Neuralink #brain chip for the first time. #elonmusk pic.twitter.com/oR22WrM9nq

- Nishant Pathak (@NishantBareilly) August 29

Vance wrote that Neuralink has performed 155 robot-assisted implantations on a variety of animals, including pigs and monkeys. But, he said, in typical Musk fashion, the billionaire continued to insist that the robot move faster and that the operation be carried out without human assistance.

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The biographer said Musk stressed the need to combat competition from other brain computing startups such as Synchron and Onward, which have already begun human trials.

“Now they're going to kick our ass,” Musk said after Synchron implanted its first device in a US patient in July 2022.

Musk said Neuralink needs to pick up the pace “like the world is ending” to keep up with artificial intelligence.

Still, while Musk's "manic sense of urgency" may have worked at Tesla or SpaceX, where he slept on the factory floor to meet deadlines, at least one Neuralink executive has taken precautions.

“We can't blow up the first three. That’s not an option here,” Siobhan Zilis, director of special projects at Neuralink and mother of Musk’s two children, told Vance, referring to the explosion of SpaceX’s first three rockets.

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