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It sounds like you probably worked on passive devices like joint implants or evolutionary things like a slightly modified version of a previous valve or pacemak

It sounds like you probably worked on passive devices like joint implants or evolutionary things like a slightly modified version of a previous valve or pacemaker. The type of system Neuralink is building - a surgical robot that implants thousands of individual active electrodes into the brain - has no comparable in med tech development history. But compare to original DBS, pacemaker, artificial heart - 100s to 1000s of animals for development. (To be clear - you took something to market, and this same complexity gives me doubts about whether Neuralink will be able to!)

bamboozled 4y ago
So the complexity of the product should mean it's development causes more animal suffering ?
- iancmceachern 4y ago
  The comment above is wrong, you are right. I've worked on similarly complex stuff (active implantable devices like artificial hearts, lvads, and surgical robotics, etc.). We don't cause our animals to suffer like this, we don't need 1500 to do our work.
  - ckemere 4y ago
    I don't understand this comment. Does an artificial heart need an onboard GPU to do the required real time signal processing? Does a arthroscopic robot localize the head of the device with < 10 um accuracy? I realize I'm coming off as a Neuralink fanboy, but I think it's ridiculous to compare next generation brain interface technology to the existing Medtronic/St Jude/Stryker space. The complexity is the reason why none of those companies would touch this with a 10 foot pole. Medtronic paid $200M to acquire a company that made a 32-channel DBS electrode and then killed the product because it was too hard to manufacture. Neuralink is trying to build a 10,000 channel device.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Do you have any resources to claim that more advanced technological devices require an order of magnitude more animals to experiment on? How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels, not euthanizing when undue suffering occurs, incorrect experimental parameters (Eg wrong chip sizes)?
      - iancmceachern 4y ago
        Exactly, in my experience the more complex the device the fewer the animals you nneed. Simole things like drugs and molecules need the highest number of animals for testing. So it's the exact opposite of what the above comment says.
      - ckemere 4y ago
        *Developing* a brain machine interface technology requires many animals because the key unknowns have to do with acquiring, processing, and manipulating brain signals (so no in vitro model). Once the technology is working, and a particular disease/disorder/disability has been identified, the final number of animals required for the FDA to give safety approval for human tests is probably similar to any other medical device. > How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels It doesn't, though my suspicion from reading the article is that these things are all reporting one side. Sealing a craniotomy (hole in the skull) is complicated, and while it is well known that vetbond on the cortical surface is a no-no, it's actually quite acceptable on the skull surface, my guess is that they had thought that the hole was sealed, but there was a crack that the vetbond went through. If you're developing a new way of making 100s of holes in the skull, I don't think it's surprising that it might not work how you model it in vitro. This is precisely why we do in vivo development in animal models. The wrong vertebra seems likely to be driven by Elon actively trying to hire engineers who don't know anything about neuroscience and then thinking he can train them fast. (I found that idea - which was in last years Neuralink presentation) incredibly annoying - typical Silicon Valley hubris.
        SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  - Bedon292 4y ago
    Some of those mistakes they have made are totally inexcusable, and I don't want to come across as defending them. Just trying to get some more context because I am clueless about the medical devices field. Those devices are developing on top of decades of research and use and not pushing into something so new aren't they? I am guessing it is probably less, but how many animals have been killed over the entire development of artificial hearts? And something like a heart can be developed almost entirely outside of a body right? You can make an artificial heart pump blood in a lab. And then test pumping blood through a cadaver. Is there any way to external experiments like that for the brain? I wouldn't expect a cadaver to have neurons firing to be able to measure them. What experiments are they doing on live animals that could be done without them while still learning the same information?
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      Thank you for the great dialog and questions. You are exactly right. In artificial hearts you start with water, then glycol water that mimics the specific gravity and viscosity of blood, then dead blood from the Ranch 99, then you can get freshly drawn blood from an animal lab and keep that warm and circulate that, then you put the pump on the outside of an animal and plumb blood in and out, then after passing all that you do an animal implant. You can't use cadavers because they usually have their blood drained. A parallel of this entire workflow exists for brain cells. You can grow animal neurons in a test tube and teach them to fly a flight simulator. This work was published 18 years ago, likely done a fair bit before then: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-fly-fighter-plane/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a...
iancmceachern 4y ago
No. Most of my work has been in active implantable like Artificial Hearts, LVADs, etc. as well as surgical robotics, dialysis, etc. Both are highly complex priducts and similar to Neuralink in their clinical work needs.
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  What, you think the development of artificial hearts took only a dozen of animal lives?

bamboozled 4y ago

So the complexity of the product should mean it's development causes more animal suffering ?

iancmceachern 4y ago
The comment above is wrong, you are right. I've worked on similarly complex stuff (active implantable devices like artificial hearts, lvads, and surgical robotics, etc.). We don't cause our animals to suffer like this, we don't need 1500 to do our work.
- ckemere 4y ago
  I don't understand this comment. Does an artificial heart need an onboard GPU to do the required real time signal processing? Does a arthroscopic robot localize the head of the device with < 10 um accuracy? I realize I'm coming off as a Neuralink fanboy, but I think it's ridiculous to compare next generation brain interface technology to the existing Medtronic/St Jude/Stryker space. The complexity is the reason why none of those companies would touch this with a 10 foot pole. Medtronic paid $200M to acquire a company that made a 32-channel DBS electrode and then killed the product because it was too hard to manufacture. Neuralink is trying to build a 10,000 channel device.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Do you have any resources to claim that more advanced technological devices require an order of magnitude more animals to experiment on? How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels, not euthanizing when undue suffering occurs, incorrect experimental parameters (Eg wrong chip sizes)?
    - iancmceachern 4y ago
      Exactly, in my experience the more complex the device the fewer the animals you nneed. Simole things like drugs and molecules need the highest number of animals for testing. So it's the exact opposite of what the above comment says.
    - ckemere 4y ago
      *Developing* a brain machine interface technology requires many animals because the key unknowns have to do with acquiring, processing, and manipulating brain signals (so no in vitro model). Once the technology is working, and a particular disease/disorder/disability has been identified, the final number of animals required for the FDA to give safety approval for human tests is probably similar to any other medical device. > How does this justify sloppy stuff like wrong vertebra, injecting random gels It doesn't, though my suspicion from reading the article is that these things are all reporting one side. Sealing a craniotomy (hole in the skull) is complicated, and while it is well known that vetbond on the cortical surface is a no-no, it's actually quite acceptable on the skull surface, my guess is that they had thought that the hole was sealed, but there was a crack that the vetbond went through. If you're developing a new way of making 100s of holes in the skull, I don't think it's surprising that it might not work how you model it in vitro. This is precisely why we do in vivo development in animal models. The wrong vertebra seems likely to be driven by Elon actively trying to hire engineers who don't know anything about neuroscience and then thinking he can train them fast. (I found that idea - which was in last years Neuralink presentation) incredibly annoying - typical Silicon Valley hubris.
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
- Bedon292 4y ago
  Some of those mistakes they have made are totally inexcusable, and I don't want to come across as defending them. Just trying to get some more context because I am clueless about the medical devices field. Those devices are developing on top of decades of research and use and not pushing into something so new aren't they? I am guessing it is probably less, but how many animals have been killed over the entire development of artificial hearts? And something like a heart can be developed almost entirely outside of a body right? You can make an artificial heart pump blood in a lab. And then test pumping blood through a cadaver. Is there any way to external experiments like that for the brain? I wouldn't expect a cadaver to have neurons firing to be able to measure them. What experiments are they doing on live animals that could be done without them while still learning the same information?
  - iancmceachern 4y ago
    Thank you for the great dialog and questions. You are exactly right. In artificial hearts you start with water, then glycol water that mimics the specific gravity and viscosity of blood, then dead blood from the Ranch 99, then you can get freshly drawn blood from an animal lab and keep that warm and circulate that, then you put the pump on the outside of an animal and plumb blood in and out, then after passing all that you do an animal implant. You can't use cadavers because they usually have their blood drained. A parallel of this entire workflow exists for brain cells. You can grow animal neurons in a test tube and teach them to fly a flight simulator. This work was published 18 years ago, likely done a fair bit before then: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a-dish-fly-fighter-plane/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6573-brain-cells-in-a...

iancmceachern 4y ago

No. Most of my work has been in active implantable like Artificial Hearts, LVADs, etc. as well as surgical robotics, dialysis, etc. Both are highly complex priducts and similar to Neuralink in their clinical work needs.

bufferoverflow 4y ago
What, you think the development of artificial hearts took only a dozen of animal lives?