Dolly is dead. (For now, anyway.) Dolly, of course, was the world's most famous sheep, the first mammal to be cloned from an adult animal, the creature that could have answered poet William Blake's previously rhetorical question "Little lamb, who made thee?" by pointing a hoof at her creator, scientist Ian Wilmut.

The six-year-old Dolly was put down in February because of a lung infection (a common enough ailment among sheep as to make her clonehood possibly not a factor). News stories referred to Dolly as middle-aged, but the average life span of sheep is still a subject of debate, compounded by a reality that Dolly was blissfully unaware of: "Nine months and then we eat them," noted Wilmut to a reporter.

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