Billionaire Elon Musk's company is preparing to test implanting chips into human brains

Elon Musk holds a Neuralink implant during a presentation of the device.

According to RT (Russia), speaking at an event organized by the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Mr. Elon Musk said the brain implant device, which has been successfully used on animals such as pigs and monkeys, will be ready for testing on real people by 2022.

“Neuralink is working well in monkeys. We are doing a lot of testing and confirming that it is very safe and reliable. The Neuralink device can be safely removed,” he said.

Elon Musk hopes the device will work well in human volunteers next year, after receiving FDA approval. Volunteers will be those with severe spinal cord injuries, paraplegia, or quadriplegia.

In a post published on December 7, Mr. Elon Musk added that his company hopes the device will help replace “faulty” or “missing” brain neurons. He also noted that many diseases can be solved simply by bridging signals between existing neurons.

The tech billionaire also said that FDA regulations are not a major obstacle, as Neuralink’s own standards for implanting devices in humans are “substantially higher” than what the federal agency requires, suggesting that the testing delays may be due to technical reasons rather than regulatory ones.

One of the world’s richest billionaire’s more controversial projects, the Neuralink implant involves implanting devices directly into the brain to compensate for nerve or spinal cord injuries that lead to disabilities, such as paralysis. After announcing trials on pigs last year, the chip was successfully tested on a 9-year-old macaque monkey in April.

According to Tin Tuc newspaper