Death of Professor Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for the discovery of HIV

The virologist described himself as a “marginal” in a white coat despite his international laurels, including the prestigious Nobel Prize awarded in 2008 for the discovery of HIV made a quarter of a century earlier, which he shared with his associate Barré-Sinoussi.

“I have always sought the unusual. I find it difficult to work on an already established current“, confessed the biologist specializing in viruses in a documentary devoted to work which he himself described as “sulphurous” on the “water memory“, broadcast on France 5 in July 2014. As evidenced by his remarks against anti-Covid vaccines, these successive positions subsequently discredited him with the scientific community.

From the “4H disease” to the discovery of HIV

In the 1980s, a handful of laboratories tried to discover as quickly as possible the origin of a strange evil then called the “disease of 4H” (because it seemed to attack mainly homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians and hemophiliacs).

In France, the virologist Luc Montagnier directed since 1972 at the Pasteur Institute a laboratory specialized in retroviruses and oncoviruses (responsible for cancers). At the beginning of 1983, he isolated with his “associates” Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann a new retrovirus which he provisionally baptized LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus) from a sample taken by Dr. Willy Rozenbaum from a young patient, a homosexual who lived in New York.

It is for him the “causal” agent of the new disease. But the discovery is greeted with “skepticism”, in particular by the American Robert Gallo, a great specialist in retroviruses. “For a year, we knew we had the right virus (…) but no one believed us and our publications were refused“, said Montagnier 30 years later.

In April 1984, Margaret Heckler, US Secretary of State for Health announced that Robert Gallo had found the “probable” cause of AIDS, a retrovirus called HTLV-III. But the latter is exactly identical to the LAV found earlier by Montagnier’s team…

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi.

Who is the real discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Montagnier or Gallo? The question is important because it makes it possible to settle the question of royalties linked to screening tests. It becomes diplomatic with a provisional conclusion in 1987: the United States and France sign a compromise where Gallo and Montagnier are officially qualified as “co-discoverers”.

The epilogue only comes 20 years later, with the awarding of the Nobel for the discovery of HIV, not to Gallo but to Montagnier and his partner Barré-Sinoussi.

For the 30th anniversary of his discovery, Professor Montagnier gave AFP a mixed assessment of this epic: “We have not succeeded in eradicating the epidemic or even the infection since we do not know how to cure someone who is infected“. Antiretroviral drugs can effectively muzzle HIV but not completely eliminate it from the body of infected people.

Antivax, water memory, papaya…

After directing an AIDS and retrovirus department at Pasteur from 1991 to 1997, then teaching at Queens College in New York until 2001, Professor Montagnier took to the sidelines. His adherence to increasingly dubious theses gradually put him under the ban of the scientific community.

He defends the “microbial track”, however subject to caution, to explain autism. It takes up the thesis of the memory of water, unanimously rejected by French researcher Jacques Benveniste, according to which water retains the imprint of substances that are no longer there. He supports theories on the emission of electromagnetic waves by DNA, promotes papaya as a remedy for certain diseases. His repeated positions against vaccines finally earned him in November 2017 the scathing and official condemnation of 106 members of the Academies of Science and Medicine.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he claims that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was manipulated in the laboratory with the addition of “sequences, including HIV“and that vaccines are responsible for the appearance of variants. These theses, opposed by virologists and epidemiologists, have further discredited this scientist.

In a very short statementthe Minister of Research, Frédérique Vidal, mentioned only the respectable facts of her career.