A woman whose epilepsy was greatly improved by an experimental brain implant was devastated when, just two years after getting it, she was forced to have it removed due to the company that made it going bankrupt.
As the MIT Technology Review reports, an Australian woman named Rita Leggett who received an experimental seizure-tracking brain-computer interface (BCI) implant from the now-defunct company Neuravista in 2010 has become a stark example not only of the ways neurotech can help people, but also of the trauma of losing access to them when experiments end or companies go under.
The article isn’t clear on if they didn’t have enough money to buy it or if the company refused for liability and safety reasons.
Regardless, we really need stringent laws about this. Anything needing surgery should irrevocably become yours, both hardware and software wise, and the company should be setting up trusts for maintenance in case of bankruptcy.
For instance if your hip implant manufacturer went out of business you wouldn’t expect them to come take your hip.
What should have happened it would have been regulatory capture where when they went out of business the government should have stepped in and taken their source code and made it public domain.
I’m sure some enterprising people would have been glad to host whatever servers were needed to keep this woman’s seizures from working and her brain implant operational.
I think the difference is likely that this is a trial. The woman likely didn’t pay for it, and they didn’t want her to because they don’t want anyone owning their tech while it’s being developed.
I mean yes but you also have to consider the face of it.
This whole thing is basically them saying sorry, we didn’t make 800 million dollars so we’re going to cut your head open and throw away what we find in there.
I don’t give a shit what the company wants or think it’s entitled to; the device was implanted inside a human body. That means the human it’s implanted in owns it, and fuck any psychopath who claims it could ever be otherwise!
That’s not what regulatory capture means. Regulatory capture is when the industry being regulated basically owns the agency writing and enforcing the regulation. Nothing they don’t want regulated gets regulated and they can use regulation to prevent new competitors. How the FAA in the US defers to airlines and airplane manufacturers is often used as an example.
Okay, so I used the wrong phrase but I think we all agree about the spirit of what I was attempting to communicate, right?
Yeah.