French biologist and virologist Luc Montagnier has died aged 89. The man who received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for leading research on the discovery of AIDS had recently made controversial comments on Covid-19.
Luc Montagnier died Tuesday at the American hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, said the mayor of the city Jean-Christophe Fromantin, confirming information from the online media France Soir.
The French researcher received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for having, in 1983, identified the AIDS virus with his associates, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann.
Controversy over a major discovery
Nearly 40 years ago, the trio of scientists had isolated a new retrovirus provisionally baptized LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus) from a sample taken from a young patient, a homosexual who had stayed in New York. For them, it is the “causal” agent of the new disease. But the discovery is greeted with “skepticism”, in particular by the American Robert Gallo, a great specialist in retroviruses. “For a year, we knew we had the right virus (…) but no one believed us and our publications were refused,” said Luc Montagnier 30 years later.
In April 1984, Margaret Heckler, US Secretary of State for Health, announced that Robert Gallo had found the “probable” cause of AIDS, a retrovirus called HTLV-III. But the latter turns out to be strictly identical to the LAV found earlier by Montagnier’s team…
The controversy then swelled: who is the real discoverer of HIV? The question is important because it makes it possible to settle the question of royalties linked to screening tests. The dispute reached a provisional and diplomatic conclusion in 1987: the United States and France signed a compromise in which Gallo and Montagnier were officially described as “co-discoverers”.
The real epilogue comes 20 years later, with the awarding of the Nobel for the discovery of HIV not to Gallo but to Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi.
Controversial statements regarding Covid-19
Luc Montagnier’s aura had faded in recent years following several controversies that had sparked controversy and earned him the condemnation of his peers.
After repeated declarations since 2017 once morest vaccines, he had been talking regarding him once more for the past two years with hypotheses on the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic refuted by the scientific community. He had thus claimed that SARS-CoV-2 had been made on the basis of HIV. His controversial remarks once morest anti-Covid vaccines had won him the sympathy of antivax.
“I have always looked for the unusual. I find it difficult to work on an already established current”, confided this biologist specializing in viruses in a documentary devoted to work which he himself described as “sulphurous” on the “Memory of Water”, released in France in July 2014.
boi with the agencies
