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...thousands of other sheep born each summer on surrounding farms. But Dolly, as the world soon came to realize, was no ordinary lamb. She was cloned from a single mammary cell of an adult ewe, overturning long-held scientific dogma that had declared such a thing biologically impossible. Her birth set off a race in laboratories around the world to duplicate the breakthrough. It also raised the specter--however distant--of human cloning...
...still surprised that cloning works," says Ian Wilmut, the embryologist who led the team that created Dolly. Ten years and 15 mammalian species later, the efficiency of the process is no better than it was at Dolly's birth: only 2% to 5% of the eggs that start out as clones end up as live animals. For each clone born, hundreds of others never make it past their first days and weeks, the victims of defects in development too severe to allow them to survive...
Clones are vulnerable throughout the cloning process, from their first days in a culture dish to their final moments in the womb to their first weeks after birth. (By contrast, embryos created by in vitro fertilization, which also start out in a petri dish, are pretty much home free if they make it past the first month in the womb.) Dolly, in fact, was the sole survivor of 277 cloning attempts. Clones, as the scientists who make them are fond of saying, are the exception rather than the rule...
...most common defect--seen across most of the species that have been cloned so far--is a condition known as large-offspring syndrome. Those clones are born larger than normal and have trouble breathing in their first few weeks. Most of the surrogates that gave birth to them experience prolonged pregnancies and sluggish, difficult labors, which may have something to do with their distended and enlarged placentas. Some of Wilmut's cloned sheep were born with incomplete body walls, with muscles and skin around their abdomen that failed to properly join. Other scientists have reported abnormalities in kidney and brain...
...Alice gave birth to her only child, Paulina, Sturm's mother. Though officially fathered by Alice's husband, Paulina was in fact the product of Alice's lengthy affair with Idaho Senator William Borah, a long-gossiped-about fact that will be confirmed by letters in Cordery's biography. "Alice had no idea how to be a mother," says Cordery. When her husband died in 1931, Alice was asked if she would run for his seat. But "Alice couldn't slap backs and kiss babies," Cordery says. Instead, she commented from the sidelines, observing that Wendell Wilkie, the Republican hope...