Nobel Prize in Medicine, Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of HIV, died in Paris at the age of 89

Paris. French virologist Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 after having managed to isolate the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) for the first time, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, French media announced on Thursday.

His death occurred at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, next to Paris, the newspaper Libération noted.

The father of three children, he was born in Chabris, in the center of France, on August 18, 1932. In 1967 he was appointed Head of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and five years later at the Viral Oncology Unit of the Institute Pasteur of Paris.

Between 1980 and 1984, Montagnier and his team at Pasteur isolated numerous human retroviruses from patients with sexual infections, hemophiliacs, mothers who had transmitted it to their children, and people infected in transfusions.

In 1983 they managed to isolate a virus that they initially called VAL (lymphadenopathy-associated virus), and which was later identified as the virus that causes AIDS and was called HIV (human immunodeficiency virus).

Montagnier also presented a blood test capable of detecting the antibodies of said virus and, in collaboration with doctors Jean-Claude Chermann and Francoise Barré-Sinoussi, published a work describing the virus.

In 1984, however, the American Robert Gallo He claimed responsibility for the discovery of HIV for his team, which gave rise to a controversy that lasted several years and was settled with the recognition of both as fathers of said finding.

Montagnier’s polemics

For more than ten years, as the French newspaper Le Monde recalled on Thursday, Montagnier had lost part of his prestige with controversial statements far from scientific orthodoxy.

He argued, for example, that Africans would have fewer problems with AIDS if they had a more balanced diet, or he proposed to cure Pope John Paul II, who had Parkinson’s disease, with fermented papaya.

In November 2017, his public position against the compulsory vaccination of children led to a public denunciation by 106 medical academics, and in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, claimed that the virus that causes covid-19 was a man-made.

Montagnier, as indicated by the Pasteur Institute in his biography, participated in the creation of several biotechnology companies in the United States and France, and is the author or co-author of 350 scientific publications and more than 750 patents.

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