Our research uses small implantable electronic circuits (Neurochips) for neural recording and stimulation with the aim of building artificial connections to replace or augment nervous pathways lost through injury or disease. For example, activity recorded in the motor cortex could be used to control electrical stimulation of the spinal cord to restore function following spinal cord injury or stroke. In this talk I will discuss the development of our Neurochip technology, and describe a series of experiments designed to test the feasibility of this approach in primates. We used a Neurochip to record the activity of motor cortex cells and arm muscles during completely unrestrained movement and compared this to data collected using a conventional tracking task. We saw robust correlations between cells and muscles on a variety of time-scales over the repertoire of waking behaviour. The range of correlation values was comparable during task performance, although many individual cells exhibited interesting differences across conditions. In a second experiment we investigated arm movements elicited by electrical stimulation of the cervical spinal cord in anesthetised primates. We found that a full range of movements could be elicited at low thresholds from sites distributed throughout the cord. Often movements involved the synergistic activation of multiple muscles. We are currently using Neurochips to implement long-term artificial connections within the motor cortex and hope soon to extend this to artificial cortico-spinal connections. We propose that a prosthesis comprised of many such connections could help to restore motor function following injury.