Poor Dolly. The world's first cloned sheep was created in 1996 and then died relatively young, aged six, suffering osteoarthritis.
Scientists thought perhaps cloned animals aged faster or suffered much greater health risks than their natural-born cousins.
However a study published today in Nature Communications shows that Dolly's cloned sisters - and nine other cloned sheep - are living healthy lives at the ripe old age of nine.
That's about 70 in human years.
Debbie, Denise, Dianna and Daisy are doing very well, although one of them has moderate signs of the osteoarthritis that afflicted her clone sister, Dolly.
The study, at the University of Nottingham in Britain, is the first to assess the long-term health outcomes of what is called "somatic-cell nuclear transfer" cloning in large animals.
The researchers, led by professor of developmental biology Kevin Sinclair, undertook metabolic tests, blood pressure measurements and musculoskeletal assessments on 13 sheep. Four of these were cloned from the same mammary glad cell line as Dolly, the others were cloned from foetal skin cells.
The cloned animals passed with flying colours, showing no signs of metabolic disease and all having normal blood pressure.
Professor Sinclair said: "[Healthy ageing in clones] has never been properly investigated. But it's really important to determine the safety of these kids of biotechnologies."
He said: "Overall, the results suggest that these animals are remarkably healthy. There is no evidence to suggest these animals are ageing abnormally or prematurely."
Professor Sinclair said that cloning is still an inefficient process overall. "A large number of transferred embryos fail to implant and of those that do, there are higher than normal incidences of failure during pregnancy."
There is also a higher than normal rate of new-born, or perinatal, losses, he said.
The next challenge, Professor Sinclair said, is to identify which embryos are most likely to lead to healthy animals, to improve clone breeding.
As well as obvious agricultural benefits to be gained from cloning healthy high-yielding animals for wool or meat and other agricultural purposes, Professor Sinclair said that there are potential huge benefits in regenerative medicine.
"One area is induced pluripotent stem cells," he said. "Cloning has a role here in generating human stem cells for future research but also perhaps for future [medical] purposes."
Research into pluripotent stem cells is at the cutting edge of medical science. Their ability to propagate and replace other types of human cells mean they could potentially replace cells in organs lost to disease.
Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon shared the 2012 Nobel prize in medicine for their work on induced pluripotent stem cells.
Professor Sinclair said: "There is nobody out there interested in generating cloned humans. It's really to generate cells for therapeutic purposes."
In Australia, human cloning is outlawed by the Prohibition of Human Cloning for Reproduction and the Regulation of Human Embryo Research Amendment Act 2006.
Dr Mark Hill, a cell development biologist at the University of NSW, said there are obvious ethical concerns around cloning human cells but that these are well regulated by the act.
He said the Nottingham University study is "a good research outcome in that it shows that the problems with Dolly were not generic to the cloning process".
