French virologist Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 after having managed to isolate the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) for the first time, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, French media announced Thursday.
Born in Chabris in 1932, Montagnier was a doctor of medicine and graduated in science from the University of Poitiers (Paris) where in 1955 he began his teaching activity. In 1967 he was appointed Head of Research and in 1975 Director of the French National Center for Scientific Research. Since 1972 he has also directed the Viral Oncology Unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He spent three years doing research in England, studying the mechanisms of virus replication in RNA and, back in France, at the Curie Institute, he began to study retroviruses, especially Rous sarcoma.
In 1983 he discovered the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome virus, work for which he is considered the father of the discovery of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus, the original cause of AIDS).
The death of the award-winning scientist, however, has now been accompanied by controversy. Anti-vaccines and conspiracy theorists have denounced the “assassination” of the scientist who in recent years had lost prestige due to different statements. For example, Montagnier showed his support for a therapy without scientific evidence, homeopathy, and in 2017 he was against the compulsory vaccination of children, which earned him a public complaint from 106 academics in his country. “We cannot accept from one of our colleagues that he uses his Nobel Prize to spread, outside the scope of his competence, dangerous messages for health, challenging the ethics that should govern science and medicine,” they wrote as collected. The world.
In recent times, he had come to affirm that SARS-CoV2 had been created in a laboratory and that it had been manufactured on the basis of HIV.