British scientist Ian Wilmot, whose team made history by being the first to clone a mammal, Dolly the sheephas died aged 79, the University of Edinburgh where he worked announced today.

Dolly was the first mammal to be cloned using an adult cell, a technological breakthrough in medical research.

Ian Wilmot was the head of the team at the Rosslyn Institute, University of Edinburgh, that cloned Dolly in 1996.

This ground-breaking research “transformed the scientific thinking of the time,” noted Peter Matheson, a University official, in the institution’s announcement honoring Wilmut.

Wilmut suffered from Parkinson’s and since 2018 has focused on research around this degenerative disorder of the central nervous system.

With the cloning method used in Dolly, dogs were cloned in 2005 in South Korea and monkeys in 2018 in China.