With the Neural-Interface Review Still Open, Clinics Wait in Limbo

LAGOS — The review has not closed, and that unfinished sentence is now a way of life. Months into a contested safety examination of a neural-interface class, regulators have neither cleared the technology nor pulled it, and the clinics that fit it are caught in the gap. At a Lagos augmentation practice this week — one of many serving the roughly five percent of humans now augmented — a surgeon described a waiting list frozen by uncertainty. "We do not tell patients it is safe, because the review has not said so," she explained. "We do not tell them it is banned, because it is not." Julian Morrow, whose firm Somaform Augmetics makes implants in the debated category, urged patience with the process while defending the devices. Advocates for augmented patients want a timeline instead of an open question. "Limbo is its own harm," one told me in the clinic waiting room. "You can plan around a yes. You can plan around a no. You cannot plan around silence."