A Sputnik moment: China’s beating the US in neuroscience

The US risks ceding healthcare and science preeminence to China if it doesn’t speed its systems for medical research and regulation, said Max Hodak, former president of Elon Musk’s Neuralink who now heads neurotechnology firm Science Corp.

“There is a very real possibility that without significant regulatory reform, if you’re a wealthy American, in 10 years, the only place you’ll be able to get your state-of-the-art cancer care is in Shanghai,” he said Wednesday at the Semafor Tech summit in San Francisco. “This is a thing we should be very mindful of. [China is] executing very competently.”

Hodak works primarily on brain-computer interfaces (BCI), or technologies that decode brain activity to perform physical actions, sometimes using chips implanted in the brain. Earlier this week, China approved the first commercially available BCI, beating the US. The country has also designated BCIs as a key national priority.

“This stuff sounds insane,” he told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti at the event. “It’s hard to take seriously, but when you do, the impacts are so great that it’s tough to imagine that not being a national priority. This is going to be one of the three or four major plot lines of the next decade. China understands the potential.”