🇺🇸 In October 2016, I Was Asked to Help Build Neuralink. I Said No.
Why BCIs Fail Series: Looking Beyond the Season Finale
🇺🇸 Here is what I Built Instead, and Who Paid For It.
🧠 In 2016, I was recruited to co-found what would become the most talked-about brain-computer interface company in the world. I declined. Not because the mission was wrong, but because the most critical problems couldn't be solved inside a company optimizing for speed to market.
🔬 Those problems are biological. Why brain implants stop working. Why neurons go silent. Why the brain's immune, vascular, and metabolic systems conspire to degrade device performance over months. I've spent a decade investigating those questions, and the answers have repeatedly overturned assumptions the field held for decades.
💰 That research was funded almost entirely by your tax dollars. NIH and NSF grants, reviewed by scientists, awarded competitively, administered through the University of Pittsburgh. Not venture capital. Not defense contracts. Public investment in basic science no company would fund because the timeline is too long and the return too uncertain.
📊 Here's what that investment produced. We discovered myelin, not neurons, is the weakest link in chronic recordings (Posts 10-12). We found the brain's blood supply actively constricts around implants for weeks (Post 13). We showed stimulation disrupts the metabolic environment it depends on (Post 14). We proved a $4 antihistamine improves recordings by targeting cells nobody was studying (Post 11).
🛫 The BCI companies building devices today are extraordinary at engineering. But every great engineering company eventually hits a wall only basic science can move. The science we are uncovering now is the runway for the next Neuralink in 20 years, the company that will build implants lasting a lifetime because we understood the biology first. That company doesn't exist yet. The science it will need is being done RIGHT NOW, in publicly funded labs, on federal grants, if we want that American company to exist in 20-30 years.
🚨 Current administration's OMB would cut NIH. The R01 grants funding this work, the training grants producing the scientists who will staff that future company, all face elimination. Cutting this funding doesn't save money. It hands the runway to China, whose national BCI roadmap commits billions while we debate whether to defund the pipeline.
🗳️ I said no in 2016 because these problems required publicly funded science a startup couldn't do. Nine years later, the data say that bet was right. The question is whether the country that funded this work will keep building the runway, or abandon it one budget cycle before the next generation needs it.
Full series: bioniclab.substack.com
#Neuroscience #NIH #YourTaxDollarsAtWork #BrainComputerInterface #WhyBCIsFail #SciencePolicy