More digging thru the article:
In February, an animal rights group, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, filed a complaint with the USDA accusing the Neuralink-UC Davis project of botching surgeries that killed monkeys and publicly released its findings.
A google search tells me the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is "a non-profit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., which promotes a plant-based diet, preventive medicine, and alternatives to animal research, and encourages what it describes as "higher standards of ethics and effectiveness in research."
This organization is also closely associated with PETA. So in other words, this is an agenda driven organization that believes complete nonsense like that all animal testing can be replaced with petri dishes and computer models.
There's a lot of alarming accusations in this article, but citing that organization was not wise.
Here's another part that bothers me:
His colleagues agreed, and the experiment was repeated with 36 sheep, according to the person with knowledge of the situation. All the animals, both the pigs and the sheep, were killed after the procedures, the person said.
I wish they would use the term "euthanized" instead of "killed," but further, an experimental endpoint involving terminal procedures or euthanasia is not at all a red flag in and of itself. Necropsies are a crucial, necessary step in countless past, present, and future research studies. Nor is euthanizing an animal that is suffering and at its humane endpoint automatically a red flag. Not euthanizing an animal that was suffering would be.
Moving on.
In a company discussion several months ago, some Neuralink employees protested after a manager said that Musk had encouraged them to do a complex surgery on pigs soon. The employees resisted on the grounds that the surgery’s complexity would lengthen the amount of time the pigs would be under anesthesia, risking their health and recovery. They argued they should first figure out how to cut down the time it would take to do the surgery.
If true, the techs are 100% right. It's called the 3R's: replacement, reduction, and refinement.
And finally.
“We’re extremely careful,” he said, to make sure that testing is “confirmatory, not exploratory,” using animal testing as a last resort after trying other methods.
In October, a month before Musk’s comments, Autumn Sorrells, the head of animal care, ordered employees to scrub "exploration" from study titles retroactively and stop using it in the future.
If true, that alone should have the organization in deep **** with the USDA.
