The conceptual artist Eduardo Kac had a glowing rabbit commissioned from a French lab, who built the rabbit by splicing glowing protein from a jellyfish with a rabbit zygote. Then the lab decided to keep the rabbit, kicking off the current controversy. Now the lab says that the rabbit died of old age (years earlier than expected), and the artist claims the rabbit's death was faked in order to preclude him from recovering her.
Since then, other glowing animals have been built: pigs, monkeys mice, fish, cats.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.04/bunny.html
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/news/2002/08/54399
The Brazilian-born, Chicago-based conceptual artist put himself on the map of global curiosity last summer when he announced that he'd created - in the name of art - a transgenic rabbit that glowed green under blue light. Of course, he hadn't done the technical work. As he described it, he'd "commissioned" the bunny from top researchers at France's Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, an organization of 8,600 people scattered among agricultural research centers around the country. INRA technicians took green fluorescent protein from the little Pacific jellyfish Aequorea victoria, and spliced it into the genes of a rabbit zygote. The resulting bunny, which Kac called Alba, was to be shown at an exhibition of digital art in the Provençal city of Avignon in June 2000. Kac (pronounced Katz) was going to create a small living room in one corner of the show and demonstrate what it would be like to have a green-glowing rabbit as a pet. And then he was going to take Alba home to his wife and child in the Windy City.But on the eve of the exhibition, the then-director of INRA, Paul Vial, suddenly said no. He didn't really say why. Didn't have to. His people made the rabbit. His people funded it. His people would keep it.
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