After the circus procession of cloned sheep, cows, mice, and goats in the past couple years, humans seemed likely to join the list soon. An autopsy revealed a withered thymus gland, where white blood cells mature, suggesting that her immune system never started working.
Failure is actually the norm in the cloning business.
Ryuzo Yanagimachi at the University of Hawaii has had perhaps the greatest success, producing five generations of cloned mice. Recently he created the first male clone, also a mouse. Yet Yanagimachi and his team had to transplant 274 embryos just to produce three live male mice, two of which died almost immediately. That's not much of an improvement over the 276 failures that preceded Dolly the sheep, the first mammal clone. There are other signs of trouble.