Luc Montaigner, discoverer of the AIDS virus, dies

The French researcher Luc Montaigner, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 along with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and the German Harald zur Hausen, for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS.

Montaigner began his career as a scientific researcher in 1955 and joined the Pasteur Institute in Paris (France) in 1972. Years later, in 1993, he established the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention. He also served as President of the Administrative Council of the European Federation for AIDS Research.

And it is that, shortly after reports began to circulate in the early 1980s about a mysterious new disease that was described predominantly in homosexual patients with compromised immune systems and rare forms of cancer and pneumonia, Montagnier began working to find the cause.

When he and others at the Pasteur Institute examined a sample in January 1983, studying a piece of swollen lymph node from a fashion designer showing early signs of the disease, they were surprised to discover what appeared to be an entirely new type of retrovirus. . It was a very powerful virus that hid in white blood cells before bursting, replicating and killing the cells that had allowed it to grow. That was his conclusion.

Thus, in September 1983, he drew a causal link between the virus and the disease at a conference at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, although many of his colleagues remained skeptical. Most thought that HTLV, the only human retrovirus known at the time, was the probable cause and not a new virus.

In the 1980s, AIDS cases began to skyrocket and infected people had little chance of survival.

Originally labeled a “gay plague” , the disease became a public health crisis as Montagnier and his team fought for recognition from the scientific community, which ignored and sometimes disparaged their early research.

Controversy

But the discovery was not without controversy. An American team led by National Cancer Institute researcher Robert C. Gallo was competing at the same time over who discovered the virus and when, since the virus culture for both investigations originally came from Montagnier’s laboratory. Eventually, Montagnier and Gallo reconciled their differences over the discovery of HIV (thanks to the intervention of President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac), with both sides acknowledging each other’s role in the search for the virus. And even in 2002, they collaborated on a paper in the journal Science , where both scientists had published their initial findings decades earlier.

Thanks to their contributions, modern science has turned HIV, one of the most fearsome diseases in human history, into a treatable and preventable condition.

French President Emmanuel Macron has paid tribute to the scientist in a written statement regarding Dr. Montagnier’s “great contribution” to the fight against AIDS and expressed his condolences to his family.

Antivacunas

Despite being a renowned scientist at the time, thanks to the discovery of the AIDS virus, he himself squandered his reputation as a researcher, distancing himself in later years from his colleagues by venturing into experiments that challenged even the basic principles of science and embraced pseudoscience . and openly opposed coronavirus vaccines. His views led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community for threatening public health.

In fact, his status received another boost during the Covid-19 pandemic when he claimed that the virus was created in a laboratory and that vaccines were responsible for the appearance of variants.

Reference: Nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2008/summary/

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