--- title: "Neuralink Cofounder Says He Quit Because of Safety Concerns" description: "During a recent interview, the other cofounder of Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain implant startup, said that he left due to safety concerns. " date: "2024-05-07" modified: "2024-05-07" authors: - name: "Noor Al-Sibai" job_title: "Senior Staff Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/nooralsibai" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/neuralink-cofounder-quit-safety-concerns" categories: - "Health & Medicine" - "Prosthetics and Devices" tags: - "BCI" - "brain-computer inferface" - "elon musk" - "neuralink" --- # Neuralink Cofounder Says He Quit Because of Safety Concerns ![During a recent interview, the other cofounder of Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain implant startup, said that he left due to safety concerns. ]() *\Image: Nikolas Kokovlis / NurPhoto via Getty / Futurism\* During a recent interview, a cofounder of Elon Musk's brain implant startup said that he left due to safety concerns. That cofounder, Dr. Benjamin Rapoport, made this stunning admission as an aside when [speaking to the *Wall Street Journal*]()'s "The Future of Everything" podcast. A neurosurgeon by training, Rapoport joined up with Musk and a team of fellow scientists in 2016 to found Neuralink, but as [*Bloomberg* reports](), he ended up leaving just a few years later and founding his own brain-computer interface (BCI) startup, Precision Neuroscience. "I’ve pretty much devoted my entire professional life to bringing neural interfaces from the world of science to the world of medicine," Rapoport told the *WSJ*'s Danny Lewis. "But I felt that in order to move to the world of medicine and technology, safety is paramount." As the neurosurgeon went on to suggest, there seemed to be disagreements at Neuralink about how invasive a BCI needed to be. "For a medical device, safety often implies minimal invasiveness," he explained. "And in the early days of brain-computer interfaces, there was this notion that in order to extract information-rich data from the brain, one needed to penetrate the brain with tiny little needle-like electrodes." This sort of heavy implantation method, as Rapoport continued, has one serious side effect: it results in "some amount of brain damage" during insertion. To his mind, there could and should be a way "to extract information-rich data from the brain without damaging the brain" — and thus, the idea for Precision Neuroscience was born. "The Neuralink system is based on penetrating microelectrodes," he continued. "The Precision system is based on surface microelectrodes, which are tiny little electrodes that coat the surface of the brain without penetrating it." The biggest difference between these two disparate philosophies could, perhaps, be best illustrated by descriptions of their real-world implantation methods. As we've [known for a while now](), Neuralink inserts its quarter-size chips by removing a part of a patient's skull and embedding the implant, allowing the chip to "replace" the bit of skull that was taken. The company has apparently perfected this method since its early monkey experimentation days in 2019 and 2020, when [things went gruesomely wrong]() in primate test subjects that the company [worked hard to cover up](). Precision, per Rapoport's description on the *WSJ* podcast, is none so intensive, and instead of removing a part of one's skull "involves making a tiny little slit in the scalp and that allows us to make an incision through the bone that is less than a millimeter in thickness." "Because the electrode films are very thin," he explained, "we can slip them through a little slit in the bone onto the brain surface." Rapoport is obviously selling a product just as stridently as his fellow Neuralink cofounder. But given that Precision [conducted its first human trials]() more than six months [before Musk's company](), despite being founded a full five years after it, it seems safe to say that this lighter touch methodology has some edge to it. **More on Neuralink**: [*The FDA Didn't Inspect Neuralink Before Granting Human Trial Approval*]() ## Author At Futurism, I've often been drawn to unpacking the narratives that underlie technological, scientific and medical progress, with a special interest in areas of conflict and ambiguity that end up setting agendas and steering the fates of both elites and the hoi polloi. I'm a committed generalist, but I often find myself returning to work involving NASA and the private space sector, the effects of AI on media and society, and the mechanics of the pharmaceutical industry, with a specific focus on the spread of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Prior to Futurism, I worked for publications ranging from Media Matters and Truthdig to Raw Story and Bustle. I'm also the author of "Myspace Scene Queens," a 2024 title in Instar Books' acclaimed "Remember the Internet" series. My work at Futurism has been cited by outlets including the New Yorker, Slate, Nieman Lab, the Verge, the MIT Technology Review, the Sunday Times, and the Daily Beast. I grew up in North Carolina, attended the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and now live in Brooklyn, New York. In my free time, I'm an avid reader and music fan; you can probably find me at a local poetry reading, concert, underground rave, or DJ set. I'm the proud parent of an ineffable orange cat named Mee-Mow. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()