Luc Montagnier, the French virologist credited as being a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has died aged 89. He jointly received the 2008 Nobel Prize was jointly awarded to Montagnier for his work in isolating the virus.
He was lauded for his crucial research, but in later life he was criticised for unscientific claims about autism and COVID.
Local news site FranceSoir reported that he died on Tuesday in Neuilly-sur-Seine “surrounded by his children”.
The virologist first began working on the virus in the early 1980s while at the Pasteur Institute in France. Montagnier and his team examined tissue samples from patients who had the mysterious new syndrome.
In 1983, Luc Montagnier’s team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV‑1. They cultured T cells from a lymph node biopsy from a 33-year-old homosexual French patient with symptoms that can precede AIDS (subsequently called pre-AIDS), such as lymphadenopathy.
Finding that they had isolated a retrovirus, they were able to infect T cells from a healthy donor, but were unable to infect other cell types, including B cells and fibroblasts.
The group concluded that this patient at risk for AIDS was infected with a T cell–tropic retrovirus; however they could only tentatively associate it with AIDS. In 2008, Luc Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi from his team were awarded the Nobel Prize for the isolation and characterisation of HIV-1.
However, US scientist Robert Gallo published similar findings in the same edition of Science in which the Pasteur team had announced theirs. He later concluded that the virus caused Aids. This led to years of heated debate over who actually discovered HIV.
Gallo revealed in 1991 that the virus he found came from the Pasteur Institute the year before, and the two men publicly agreed in 2002 that Montagnier’s team discovered HIV, but that Gallo first showed its role in causing Aids.
However, when Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008 for their work – alongside Harald zur Hausen for his work on cervical cancer – the committee made no mention of Gallo, which provoked controversy.
Later on, Montagnier attracted great criticism for a series of unscientific claims, including over the causes of autism and later over the origins of COVID.
French media first reported that he had died at the American hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 8 February, and his death was officially declared by authorities some time later.
Source: BBC News
