LONDON (AP) Ian Wilmut, the cloning pioneer whose work was critical to the creation of Dolly the Sheep in 1996, has died at age 79.

The University of Edinburgh in Scotland said Wilmut died Sunday after a long illness with Parkinsons disease.

Wilmut set off a global discussion about the ethics of cloning when he announced that his team at the universitys Roslin Institute for animal biosciences had cloned a lamb using the nucleus of a cell from an adult sheep.

Initially referred to as 6LL3 in the academic paper describing the work, the lamb was later named Dolly, after the singer Dolly Parton. The lambs cloning was the first time scientists were able to coax a mature adult cell into behaving like a cell from a newly fertilized embryo in order to create a genetically identical animal.

While Dollys creation was heralded as a revolution by some scientists, it unnerved many, with critics calling such experiments unethical.