Most efforts, including the recent news of a disease-detecting rhesusmonkey (bred with a glowing jellyfish gene), focus on improving the characteristics of existing organisms.
Nicolelis and colleagues have shown that a rhesusmonkey in North Carolina could, using only its brain, control the walking patterns of a robot in Japan.
On May 28, 1959 a rhesusmonkey named Able and a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker blasted off on an American Jupiter missile and became the first primates to successfully travel into space and return to Earth alive.
Mitalipov's breakthrough was the result of merging skin cells of a 9-year-old rhesus macaque male with unfertilized monkey eggs that had the DNA removed.