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The Neuroscientist Who Tested a Brain Implant On Himself (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Our understanding of the brain has come a long way in the past thirty years, but most brain-related medical procedures remain incredibly complicated and dangerous. Neurologist Phil Kennedy has been working on brain-computer interfaces since the 1980s. He was most notably involved in letting a patient with "locked in" syndrome interact with the outside world through a brain-controlled computer cursor. But the FDA has gradually ramped up its safety demands, and in the past decade they've shut down Kennedy's research. So he did what any determined inventor would do: he went to a hospital in Belize and had surgeons there implant electrodes on his own brain so he could continue his research.
"After returning home to Duluth, Georgia, Kennedy began to toil largely alone in his speech lab, recording his neurons as he repeated 29 phonemes (such as e, eh, a, o, u, and consonants like ch and j) out loud, and then silently imagined saying them. ... Kennedy says his early findings are 'extremely encouraging.' He says he determined that different combinations of the 65 neurons he was recording from consistently fired every time he spoke certain sounds aloud, and also fired when he imagined speaking them—a relationship that is potentially key to developing a thought decoder for speech." Eventually, Kennedy had to have the implants removed, but he hopes the data he gathered will help push the FDA toward supporting this research once more.
"After returning home to Duluth, Georgia, Kennedy began to toil largely alone in his speech lab, recording his neurons as he repeated 29 phonemes (such as e, eh, a, o, u, and consonants like ch and j) out loud, and then silently imagined saying them. ... Kennedy says his early findings are 'extremely encouraging.' He says he determined that different combinations of the 65 neurons he was recording from consistently fired every time he spoke certain sounds aloud, and also fired when he imagined speaking them—a relationship that is potentially key to developing a thought decoder for speech." Eventually, Kennedy had to have the implants removed, but he hopes the data he gathered will help push the FDA toward supporting this research once more.
The funny side of this story is, why did he have the implants removed? Side effects caused him to stop working himself as a patient? :) This appear's to be a "no brainer" :)
Unfortunately the electrodes had to be removed due to complications and he can't continue these tests on himself. I wonder if the fda is preventing research on people who would volunteer for such a procedure, and why the fda would stop people from doing it voluntarily if to doesn't harm anyone else?
Twinstiq, game news
He is certainly committed to his work, and for a noble cause too. I hope he succeeds.
Unfortunately the electrodes had to be removed due to complications and he can't continue these tests on himself. I wonder if the fda is preventing research on people who would volunteer for such a procedure, and why the fda would stop people from doing it voluntarily if to doesn't harm anyone else?
Ethics.
Lawsuits
Finding people who don't mind a good chance they will end up dead, or worse, paralyzed.
Probably the only people who would volunteer for this sort of thing are prisoners looking at a life sentence reduction and who wouldn't mind being dead if it meant they were getting out of the pokey.
And lawsuits. Signing a piece of paper doesn't protect the doctor from "gross negligence" lawsuits. Some one on a ventilator and immobile in the courtroom maks almost as unbeatable and sympathetic a victim as an aggrieved mother who lost her baby. Which is related to why there aren't many drugs approved for pregnant women - way too dangerous to do the testing.
There has been a rather spotty record on medical ethics in research, so I'm not surprised the FDA clamps down on brain surgery on healthy people for shits and giggles.
Even my prisoner example has extreme oversight issues. Some folks still aren't all that happy about the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, when they decided to see what happened to men when purposely leaving their disease untreated while pretending to treat it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's definitely not a simple "We need to know this stuff" matter. No holds barred experimentation, and it starts to resemble this: https://owlspace-ccm.rice.edu/...
We actually learned a lot of stuff from those high altitude evil experiments, which is a bit disturbing on many levels.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The article says his skull never fully closed and that this was a dangerous condition to have. Why that is I am not sure. It also goes on to say that he intended to have the implants for a number of year. Instead he chose to remove the implants since surgery needed to happen and the more surgeries the more chances there are for a life ending event to happen.
That's the biggest issue with implants. They seem to cause harm to the adjacent tissue and eventually stop working. We need "softer" implants that last a long time themselves and let the tissue they are connected to last for a long time also. It seems to me that grids of needles are a dead-end for long term viability.
That man is a hero. The FDA is the villian.
This comes down to personal liberty, or it should, if our legal system wasn't completely polluted by idiots.
He had to go to Belize to get this done. He couldn't just say "This is what I want, let's do this." What a travesty.
Sometimes I don't know why we let congress and its designated rule-spewers make rules at all. They amount to the very worst kind of helicopter parents -- and they're not even legitimately in the role.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If you RTFA, you'll see the problem was the FDA wanted safety data he couldn't provide as he did not have the funds to obtain the data.
What I find amazing is how much we still DON'T know about the brain.
I had non-invasive brain surgery about a decade ago. About a third of my thalamus had to be destroyed (with a proton beam!) to stop a serious hemorrhage in my brain. I asked the various neurologists and neurosurgeons beforehand if this would cause any issues. They all answered "We don't think so, but we really don't know."
So now I get to pretend to forget about anything I don't want to remember before that time. And did I lose any functions or memories? Who knows?