Andriy Onufriyenko via Getty
Things aren’t going too hot for Elon Musk’s brain chip startup Neuralink.
In between the allegations of animal abuse, the stifling and abusive workplace, and the fact that Musk secretly fathered twins with one of Neuralink’s top executives, the company—like so many run by the billionaire CEO—has been slow to actually deliver on its promise of a commercially-viable brain-computer interface (BCI). Instead, it’s been routinely beaten to the punch by competitors that haven’t had nearly as much god awful press.
Synchron, a New York-based biotech company, is one such competitor. The company announced that on July 6, a doctor in New York implanted their BCI device, dubbed a stentrode, into a patient with ALS—allowing the patient to potentially communicate via email and text by simply thinking. While Synchron already beat Neuralink when they implanted their device in four patients in Australia, the procedure earlier this month was its first for a U.S. patient.
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