Doctors Remove Woman’s Brain Implant Against Her Will

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.

Leggett was, as a recent paper in the journal Brain Stimulation about her situation explains, 49 when she was recruited for the trial, though she'd suffered from epilepsy since she was just three years old.

Leggett, who declined to be interviewed by the Tech Review after a recent stroke, also developed a symbiotic relationship with the implant, and told the researchers behind the Brain Stimulation paper that she and the BCI "became one."

In fact, it calls to mind a similar incident last year in which the manufacturer of a bionic eye decided the units were obsolete, leading patients who'd had them implanted to lose their vision again.

It sounds like dystopian fiction that biotech companies could play takesie-backsies with patients' implants, in other words, but the reality is we've already crossed into that world.

And if devices such as Leggett's BCI can, as she suggested to researchers over the years, become part of a person, then their removal "represents a form of modification of the self," Ienca said, and he and his coauthors are arguing that there need to be updated patients' rights when it comes to these sorts of outcomes.

Saved 62% of original text.