PARIS: French virologist Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize for his part in discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, has died aged 89.
Montagnier shared half of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine with fellow French scientist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi for their role in discovering the virus but was later dismissed by the scientific community for his increasingly outlandish theories, notably on Covid-19.
Montagnier had a bitter rivalry with US scientist Robert Gallo in his ground-breaking work in identifying HIV at the virology department he created in Paris in 1972. Both are co-credited with discovering that HIV causes AIDS, and their rival claims led for several years to a legal and even diplomatic dispute between France and the United States.
Montagnier’s work started in January 1983, when tissue samples arrived at the Pasteur Institute from a patient with a disease that mysteriously wrecked the immune system. He later recalled the “sense of isolation” as the team battled to make this vital connection.
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In 1986 Montagnier shared the Lasker Award – the US equivalent of the Nobel – with Gallo and Myron Essex. In 2011, to mark 30 years since the appearance of AIDS, Montagnier warned of the spiralling costs of treating the 33 million then stricken with HIV.
Montagnier was born on August 8, 1932 at Chabris in the Indre region of central France. After heading Pasteur’s AIDS department from 1991 to 1997, and then teaching at Queens College in New York, Montagnier stirred several controversies among the scientific community.
He repeatedly suggested that autism is caused by infection and set up experiments to prove it, claiming antibiotics could cure the condition. He stunned many of his peers when he talked of the purported ability of water to retain a memory of substances. He also believed that anyone with a good immune system could fight off HIV with the right diet.
Montagnier supported theories that DNA left an electromagnetic trace in water that could be used to diagnose AIDS and Lyme’s Disease, and championed the therapeutic qualities of fermented papaya for Parkinson’s Disease.
During the Covid pandemic, he stood out again, stating that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was laboratory-made and that vaccines were responsible for the appearance of variants. These theories, rejected by virologists and epidemiologists, made him even more into a pariah among his peers, but a hero to French anti-vaxxers.
