Ben Rapoport — Treating Paralysis and Digitizing Neural Data

Ben is co-founder and CSO of Precision Neuroscience, Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Scientific Director at Mount Sinai. Previously, he co-founded Neuralink and Simbionics (acquired by Apple).Precision is building a minimally invasive brain-computer interface (BCI) that reads from thousands of points on the cortex without penetrating it. The Layer 7 device is implanted through a one-millimeter slit in the skull rather than the larger borehole other approaches require. It is also fully removable.Precision seeks to help the 5 million people living with severe paralysis in the US (including 800,000 new stroke cases per year). In March 2025, Precision received FDA clearance for a temporary wired version of the system. Over 85 patients have been implanted with and used the device in clinical studies. Wireless implants are planned for 2027.We go deep on the history of Neurotech from the 1980s to the ML inflection points that triggered Neuralink's founding, why surface ECoG was a contrarian bet that's now paying off, the path to treating paralysis and stroke at scale, and why Ben believes neural data is at the same inflection point genomic data was in 2000 — a whole class of biological problems about to become tractable as computer science problems.Sections00:00:00 Introduction 00:04:39 Paralysis as a lens to understand the brain00:05:36 The 1980s breakthrough: population encoding and the birth of BCI00:14:36 Google Translate, ML, and the founding of Neuralink00:23:08 What is the long-term vision of Precision Neuroscience00:31:56 Layer 7 and why transformative technology always looks impossible at first00:50:21 The surgery: a slit in the skull, not a borehole00:55:19 The clinical program: who are the patients01:04:16 FDA clearance and the path to wireless implants in 202701:08:32 The patient population: paralysis and stroke at scale01:16:26 Neural data as the new genomics01:30:06 BCIs, AI, and the future of the human-machine interface01:31:22 From medical necessity to lifestyle technology01:40:36 Precision as a platform — and an optimistic visionLinks from the PodcastPrecision NeuroscienceLayer 7 BCIIcahn School of Medicine at Mount SinaiLinksJuan Benet on XJuan Benet PodcastProtocol LabsPL NeuroDisclaimer⁠