How To Build The Future: Max Hodak
Max Hodak, co-founder of Neuralink and founder of Science, has achieved what once seemed impossible: restoring sight to blind patients through brain–computer interfaces. More than 40 people have already received Science's retinal prosthesis, which bypasses dead photoreceptors to deliver images directly into the brain—enabling patients who couldn't see faces for a decade to read every letter on an eye chart. But the real question isn't just what BCIs can do today; it's whether we're witnessing the dawn of a new era in which the brain becomes an engineerable substrate, consciousness becomes a design problem, and the first humans to live a thousand years are already alive. Can neural engineering succeed where drug discovery has failed, and what happens when humanity's interface with reality becomes fully programmable?
Punti chiave
Science's Prima implant allows blind patients to see by stimulating bipolar cells under the retina with light, bypassing dead rods and cones to restore form vision—the first time coherent images have been created in the mind's eye of a formerly blind person.
Neural engineering is empirically superior to drug discovery: while gene therapies cost a million dollars per patient with marginal benefit, Science's BCI can restore vision to patients who have been unable to see faces for a decade.
The brain remains highly plastic throughout adulthood under feedback, enabling patients to learn to control neurons within minutes and BCIs to adapt bidirectionally—making ultra-high-bandwidth brain–machine hybrids plausible in the coming decade.
Hodak believes the first people to live to a thousand are alive today, and that by 2035 we will have passed an «event horizon» where the combination of AI and BCI fundamentally reconfigures the human condition.
Brain–computer interfaces will fragment into many products serving different applications—from non-invasive ultrasound focus stimulators to fully implantable bio-hybrid systems—much like pharma, not a single product category.
In breve
Brain–computer interfaces are no longer incremental—they represent a paradigm shift in medicine from drug discovery to neural engineering, with the potential to restore lost function, reframe human longevity, and ultimately create conscious machines we can merge with.
Prima: Restoring Sight by Engineering the Retina
Science's retinal implant bypasses dead photoreceptors to create form vision in blind patients.
Science recently completed a clinical trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in which more than 40 patients received the Prima implant—a 2mm × 2mm silicon chip implanted under the retina. The chip functions as an array of tiny solar panels. Patients wear glasses with a camera and laser projector: the camera captures the world, and the laser projects the image onto the implant, which absorbs light and excites bipolar cells directly above it. This bypasses dead rods and cones, the cells that normally make the eye light-sensitive, to restore vision in patients blinded by diseases like age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
The breakthrough was identifying which layer of the retina to stimulate. Earlier attempts, like Second Sight's device, stimulated retinal ganglion cells—1.5 million cells that compress and encode visual information into edges, motion, and color. Stimulating them produced only flashes of light because the brain couldn't decode the compressed signal. Science stimulates the 100 million bipolar cells instead, preserving the retina's natural processing. The result: patients who couldn't see faces for a decade can now read every letter on an eye chart. The trial demonstrated the first time form vision—a coherent image in the mind's eye—had been restored to a blind person.
The Neural Engineering Paradigm
BCIs empirically outperform drug discovery and offer a fundamental reframing of medicine.
The Neural Engineering Paradigm
Hodak contrasts drug discovery with neural engineering: «Humanity just isn't very good at drug discovery. Every now and then you find a thing, it's amazing, like you find a GLP-1… but it's much more common that you spend a decade going down this path and then at the end you run a study and the answer is no.» There's a million-dollar-per-patient gene therapy for inherited retinal disease with marginal benefit for a tiny percentage of patients. By contrast, Science's BCI restores dramatic function. «The brain is the only organ that really in some deep sense matters, and we are also just empirically much better at engineering it.» This paradigm shift—treating the brain as an engineerable computer—unlocks capabilities impossible through chemistry alone.
The Brain as an Engineerable Computer
First-Principles Approach to Retinal Restoration
Science systematically explored all technical pathways before choosing electrical bipolar cell stimulation.
Map the Design Space Hodak's team examined a 2×2 matrix: stimulate bipolar cells or ganglion cells, and do it electrically or with optogenetics. They developed all four approaches in parallel.
Rule Out Ganglion Cells Stimulating the 1.5 million ganglion cells required decoding a million-degree-of-freedom compression the brain had already performed. This was impractical and produced only flashes of light, not images.
Develop Optogenetics Science created state-of-the-art optogenetic proteins sensitive to indoor lighting (not just bright lasers), published in fall 2023. But this approach remained 5–7 years from clinical translation.
Acquire Electrical Stimulation Tech A Stanford-invented technology for electrical stimulation of bipolar cells existed in Europe. Science acquired the company and brought the Prima implant to a 40-patient trial in 17 sites.
Validate Form Vision The trial proved that stimulating bipolar cells with a projected image creates coherent form vision—black and white, limited field of view, but genuine sight.
Bio-Hybrid Neural Interfaces: Growing New Cranial Nerves
Science's second platform uses living neurons to form biological connections with the brain.
Science's bio-hybrid approach asks: how would nature build an ultra-high-bandwidth brain interface? The answer: grow a new nerve bundle, like the corpus callosum (200 million fibers connecting the brain's hemispheres). Science seeds implants with hypoimmunogenic stem-cell-derived neurons—hidden from the immune system so they don't require per-patient manufacturing or immunosuppression. These engineered neurons are placed in a device and engrafted onto the brain. Unlike optogenetic approaches that genetically modify the patient's own neurons (a one-way door), only the graft cells are edited. If they fail, the patient is no worse off.
In animal models, these neurons grow throughout the brain and form biological connections everywhere. Hodak calls this the «Avatar Q»—a reference to James Cameron's aliens with ponytail connectors. It's a new cranial nerve with a USB port at the end. The advantage: biological connections support plasticity and bidirectional communication at bandwidths impossible with electrodes. The latent space of the graft can translate between the brain's representations and external systems, enabling brain-to-brain connections or brain-to-AI merges. This is not ready for humans yet, but represents the highest-bandwidth BCI path.
Vessel: Perfusion as Life Extension
Science's third project aims to make organ support systems portable and affordable.
A decade ago, Hodak read a case study in The Lancet about a 17-year-old kept alive on an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) circuit while waiting for a lung transplant. The boy's lungs had failed, but the machine was oxygenating his blood—he played video games, did homework, hung out with friends. When he was removed from the transplant list due to a complication, doctors faced an ethical dilemma: he consumed a half-million-dollar-per-month ICU suite. Families were discouraged from pursuing ECMO as a «bridge to nowhere.» Hodak realized the technology existed to keep people alive indefinitely, but it was economically and physically impractical.
The same perfusion technology has transformed organ transplantation: 75% of US liver transplants now use normothermic machine perfusion (NMP), scheduling surgeries for the afternoon instead of the middle of the night. But existing systems cost $500,000 and require private jets. Science's Vessel project aims to shrink and refine perfusion systems so a kidney can be checked as luggage on a United flight—or so a patient can bring a system home in a backpack. Combined with BCIs that restore vision, hearing, balance, and motor control, Hodak sees a path to «brain in a vat» scenarios with high quality of life, fundamentally reframing medicine and longevity.
The 2035 Event Horizon
Hodak sees an impenetrable wall at 2035 beyond which the future is unimaginable.
“I have this event horizon at 2035 now. When I was earlier in my life I always kind of prided myself on the ability to see the future, and the next few years I think I have a sense of, but by 2035 it's just impossible. There's like I can't see past it. I think it is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now. And I think it might be many more people than you think.”
Key Numbers from the Prima Trial
Clinical and economic metrics from Science's retinal prosthesis breakthrough.
Persone
Glossario
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