Montagnier, who co-identified the virus behind AIDS, shared the 2008 Nobel Prize…
Luc Montagnier, the French virologist and Nobel laureate whose co-discovery of HIV sparked a global search for an AIDS cure, has died. Montagnier died on February 8 at a hospital in a suburb of Paris at the age of 89.
Luc Antoine Montagnier was born on August 18, 1932, in Chabris, located in a French agricultural region south of the Loire Valley in central France. Excelling at science as a child, Montagnier studied medicine and science in Poitiers. Montagnier decided to become a virologist in 1957 with a focus on infectious viral ribonucleic acid, which plays a vital role in the behaviour of genes. In 1972, Montagnier moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris to set up a viral-oncology unit and was joined there in 1975 by Francoise Barre-Sinoussi. Ten years later, the two scientists were assigned the task of searching for the virus that causes AIDS, thought to be a form of human cancer at the time.
Montagnier’s search for the cause of AIDS, a mystery disease in the early 1980s that was mainly infecting young gay men in California and New York, involved identifying viral isolates from patients with swollen lymph nodes and from people with full-blown AIDS. In September 1983, he drew a causal link between the virus and the disease at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, though many of his peers remained skeptical. Most still considered HTLV, the only human retrovirus known until that time, as the likely cause.
However, Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi’s discovery was correct and their achievement ultimately sped the way to HIV tests and antiretroviral drugs that help keep the disease at bay. In 2008 Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in isolating the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Montagnier also claimed that while the epidemic was new, the virus was old, perhaps as long as primates have existed.
After heading Pasteur’s AIDS department from 1991 to 1997, and then teaching at Queens College in New York, Montagnier gradually drifted to the scientific fringes, stirring controversy after controversy.
About 38 million people worldwide are thought to be living with HIV; related illnesses have already killed about 36 million, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. In its latest report, from June 2021, the Kaiser Family Foundation said that about 1.2 million Americans were living with HIV and more than 700,000 people had died from related illness.
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