Luc Montagnier: death of the Nobel Prize, discoverer of HIV

Rejected late for dubious theories, the researcher Luc Montagnierwho died at the age of 89, remains forever associated with the discovery of virus of AIDS which earned him the prestigious Nobel Prize in Medicine. His controversial remarks against vaccines anti-Covid-19 had put him back in the spotlight, attracting him the sympathy antivax and further discrediting it with the scientific community. ” I have always sought the unusual. I find it difficult to work on an already established current “, confided this biologist, specialist in viruses, in a documentary devoted to work which he himself described as “sulphurous” on the “memory of water”, broadcast on France 5, in July 2014.

A marginal who was looking for the unusual

Thin metallic glasses, eye lively and still a baby face at the age of 80, the virologist described himself as a “marginal” in a white coat despite his laurels international, with the Nobel Prize awarded in 2008 for a discovery made a quarter of a century earlier.

You have to go back to the atmosphere of the 1980s to understand the fever which had taken hold of a handful of laboratories in the world: to discover as quickly as possible the origin of a strange illness which was called, for lack of a better word, “4H disease” (because it seemed to attack essentially the homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians and hemophiliacs). Born on August 8, 1932 in Chabris, in Indre (central France), the virologist Luc Montagnier directed since 1972 at the Institut Pasteur a laboratory specializing in retrovirus and oncoviruses (responsible for cancer).

At the beginning of 1983, he isolates with his “associates”, Francoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, a new retrovirus which he provisionally baptizes LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus) from a sample taken by Dr. Willy Rozenbaum on a young patient, a homosexual who had stayed in New York.

Co-discoverers of the “4H Disease”

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 turns out to be strictly identical to the LAV found earlier by Montagnier’s team…

The controversy swells: who is the real discoverer of the 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 the tests of screening. The dispute reached a provisional and diplomatic conclusion in 1987: the United States and France signed a compromise in which Gallo and Montagnier were officially described as “co-discoverers”. The real epilogue comes 20 years later, with the awarding of the Nobel for the discovery of HIV, not to Gallo but to Montagnier and his associate Barré-Sinoussi.

A few years later, for the 30^and anniversary of his discovery, Professor Montagnier drew up for AFP a mixed results of this epic: We have not succeeded in eradicating the epidemic or even the infection sincewe don’t know how to heal someone who is infected “. Antiretroviral drugs can effectively muzzle HIV but not completely eliminate it from the body of infected people.

The hour of rejection and dubious theories

After leading an AIDS and retrovirus department at Pasteur from 1991 to 1997, then teaching at the Queens College from New York until 2001, Prof. Montagnier took to the crossroads of scientific research and gradually became ostracized from the scientific community. He defends the “microbial track”, however subject to caution, to explain autism.

It takes up the unanimously rejected thesis of the French researcher Jacques Benveniste according to which water retains the imprint (the “memory”) of substances that are no longer there. It supports theories aboutepisode ofelectromagnetic waves by theDNApromotes the papaya as a remedy for certain diseases.

His repeated positions against vaccines earned him in November 2017 the scathing and official condemnation of 106 members of the Academies of Science and Medicine. The newspaper Le Figaro describes his journey as a “slow scientific shipwreck”.

During the pandemic of Covid-19, he illustrates himself again, affirming that the virus SARS-CoV-2 has been 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 a scientist who has become a “pariah” among his peers.