Aiming to keep pace with what American entrepreneur Elon Musk’s Neuralink has achieved, China has recently unveiled a set of ethical guidelines for companies wishing to do invasive brain chip research on humans.
For example, the Artificial Intelligence Ethics Subcommittee of the National Science and Technology Ethics Committee, a unit of China’s State Council, says in the guidelines that technology firms must have written consent, either from those who plan to receive implanted brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in their heads or from their guardians.
The guidelines came after Neuralink successfully implanted a brain chip into a person for the first time in January. Musk said on Monday that the human patient seems to have made a full recovery from the surgery and is able to move a mouse around the screen just by thinking.
Last September, Neuralink said it had received approval from US regulators to recruit human beings for the trial of its brain chip experiments. The patient, whose identity has not been released, is believed to be a person with quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
Chinese President Xi Jinping said earlier this month that the country should build “new productive forces” to upgrade its manufacturing sectors.
According to the plan, China will nurture its own technology firms and research institutions that are engaged in work on artificial intelligence, the next iteration of the internet (termed the “metaverse”) and the making of humanoid robots and BCIs.
China’s Neuralink
There are three types of BCIs in the markets. Non-invasive BCIs refer to headbands that detect brainwave signals. Invasive BCIs require brain surgery while semi-invasive ones are located under the skull but are not attached to the brain.
Last May, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved human trials for invasive BCIs. According to an online database of active clinical trials in the US, there are more than 40 BCI trials underway.
Neuralink has tested out its brain chips on pigs and monkeys. Media reports said some monkeys died or suffered from paralysis, seizures and brain swelling but the company said none of them died as a result of their implants.
In April 2021, Neuralink released a video showing a monkey playing Pong video games with his brain.
NeuroXess, a Shanghai-based company established in 2016, said last July that it had implanted a chip in a monkey’s brain in May, allowing the animal to play a Pong video game with its mind.
The company also said it achieved 85% accuracy when analyzing the monkey’s brain cells to predict how it will pull the joystick. It said the delay time was within 30 milliseconds.
Peng Lei, founder and chief executive of NeuroXess, said in the China Entrepreneurs Forum on Thursday that Neuralink’s brain chip can help the patient control a mouse, meaning that it can decode up to a hundred channels of neurons. He said he expects that Neuralink’s future patient will soon be able to use a brain chip to control a robot arm or a wheelchair.
He said in a previous interview that his company will take the same approach as Neuralink to implant neuropixels, or next-generation electrodes that can record the activity of hundreds of neurons, to human’s brains. But he said the neuropixels will be surrounded with biodegradable silk protein to reduce tissue damage and lower the risks of rejection reaction.
He said he expects the number of channels that a BCI can decode to double by every 18 months, creating a new Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double about every two years.
Apart from NeuroXess, key BCI startups in China include NeuraHua, NeuraMatrix, Shanghai StairMed Technology and BrainUp Technology.
According to China’s newly-launched guidelines, companies need approval from the government for doing BCI research on humans. They need to finish clinical trials in animals before implanting brain chips into patients.
The guidelines also say:
- Companies should ensure that people’s privacy and personal information are well-protected.
- Technology companies should not conduct illegal activities, infringe people’s legitimate rights, undermine social stability or falsely advertise the capabilities of their products.
- The country encourages research on restorative brain-computer interfaces, which are aimed at helping patients or disabled people restore their missing sensory, limb and language functions.
- The country also encourages the development of non-medical BCI products for regulating attention, sleep and memory, as well as controlling robotic exoskeletons.
- BCI product developers will be penalized if they violate the nation’s law and standard practices.
The guidelines were drafted by the National Science and Technology Ethics Committee, together with a group of research institutions including Peng Cheng Laboratory, Peking University and Zhejiang University, Xinhua reported. The committee has sought opinions from high schools, scientific research institutions and companies.
Government’s support
In 2021, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology announced the Brain Science and Brain-like Intelligence Technology Development Plan, which outlined the country’s roadmap to develop neuroscience by 2030.
The plan said the government will provide support to companies and research institutions to develop their BCI projects and encourage the sharing of databases.
“Like many other countries, China attaches great importance to research in neuroscience. The development of this technology has already become China’s national strategy in recent two years,” Zhu Yashu, a researcher at the National Institute of Finance, Tsinghua University, says in an article published last year.
However, Zhu points out that China does not have commercialized neuropixels and has to import them from the US. She says China also needs to purchase high-end semiconductors from Global Foundries and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and metal wires from TE Connectivity and Furukawa Electric.
She says China has started developing its signal processing and machine-learning algorithms for BCIs but is still lacking behind Google’s Deepmind, BrainGate and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the US.
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Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3
ALS is a cruel disease. My mum is 83 and had great difficulty speaking and swallowing much of anything. Food was getting trapped in her throat and blocking her air way was happening more often. she battled for each breath. The riluzole did very little to help her. The medical team did even less. Her decline was rapid and devastating. The psychological support from the medical centre was non-existent and if it were not for the sensitive care and attention of our primary physician, there she would have died. There has been little if any progress in finding a cure or reliable treatment. Acupuncture eased her anxiety a bit. this year our primary physician started her on Natural Herbs Centre ALS/MND Ayurvedic treatment, 6 months into treatment she improved dramatically. It has been a complete turnaround with her speech, she no longer needs the feeding tube to feed, the treatment is a miracle. She recovered significantly!