The first animal to human heart transplant was made. Dr. James Hardy at the University of Mississippi transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee (named Bino) into the chest of Boyd Rush (age 68) in a last-ditch effort to save the man's life because no human was heart available. The newly-transplanted heart beat on its own; but it was too small to maintain independent circulation and Rush died after 90 minutes. Hardy had to endure some severe criticism. (This was three years before Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful human heart transplant). Hardy also made the first human lung transplant in 1963 and a double-lung transplant that left the heart in place in 1987.

The birth and 7-minute life of the first extinct-animal clone was described in the journal Theriogenology. A clone of the Pyranean ibex, or bucardo, was created using DNA from frozen skin samples taken in 1999 from the last individual before it died (6 Jan 2000). The mother was a closely-related subspecies of the Spanish ibex. The surrogate goat was implanted with an egg into which the bucardo's DNA had been inserted to replace the original genetic material. The research effort was the work of a team of scientists at the Center for Agro-Nutrition Research and Technology in Aragon, Spain. The team had implanted 208 embryos in different goats, of which seven became pregnant. Of those, just one resulted in a live birth, a clone that died within 7 minutes of respiratory failure due to lung defects. The bucardo thus went extinct a second time.