Doctor and researcher, Nobel Prize in Medicine (2008), Luc Montagnier died on Tuesday February 8 at the age of 89. The news of his death had been circulating on social networks since Wednesday, the information was confirmed on Thursday with Release by the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Rewarded by the Stockholm jury for his contribution to the discovery, in 1983 at the Pasteur Institute, of the virus responsible for AIDS, an actor in the fight once morest this disease, he had subsequently multiplied heterodox positions in scientific matters and medicine, arousing consternation and disapproval among his peers.
Luc Montagnier was born on August 18, 1932 in Chabris (Indre), into a modest family – his father was an accountant and his mother was a homemaker. After secondary school in Châtellerault (Vienne), then medicine in Poitiers then Paris, he opted for a career in virology research, captivated by the role of RNA in the machinery of certain viruses.
After a stay in the United Kingdom, where he brought to light the role of this molecule in replication mechanisms and worked on oncogenes, he returned to Paris, to the Institut Curie. He shows that a retrovirus responsible for Rous sarcoma integrates its genetic heritage into the DNA of infected cells.
The Institut Pasteur invited him in 1972 to create a viral oncology unit within the new virology department. This is where Jean-Claude Chermann and his collaborator Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who have expertise in animal retroviruses, joined him in 1977. The rest is now part of history.
Franco-American showdown
At the beginning of 1983, the clinical doctor Willy Rozenbaum entrusts them with a lymph node taken from a young patient suffering from a disease of still mysterious origin – it will later be called AIDS, for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. On May 20, 1983, Luc Montagnier was the last author – a rank designating the person who supervises work – of an article published in Science, of which Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is the first signatory – generally the person in charge of the work “on the bench”. This article describes a retrovirus identified in the tissues brought by Willy Rozenbaum, and suspected to be the causative agent of the new disease. In the same issue of ScienceRobert Gallo’s team at the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), proposes another virus as the putative cause of AIDS.
It was the start of a long battle in paternity around the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), pitting Luc Montagnier, who then became the figurehead of research once morest AIDS in France, once morest his counterpart Robert Gallo. The issue is not only a dispute over academic anteriority. The market for screening tests for the AIDS virus is at the heart of a Franco-American standoff that is being played out around patents. A first agreement will be reached between the two parties in December 1987 under the aegis of Jacques Chirac and Ronald Reagan: in Europe, the royalties will go to the Pasteur Institute, in the United States, they will be shared between the two teams.
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