The co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, Professor Luc Montagnier, died Tuesday evening at the American hospital in Neuilly at the age of 89. The town hall of Neuilly confirmed to Franceinfo this Thursday afternoon that it had registered his death certificate. This prestigious virologist and biologist has received numerous awards, including the CNRS silver medal. Professor Emeritus at the Institut Pasteur, where he headed the Viral Oncology Unit from 1972 to 2000, Honorary Research Director at the CNRS and member of the Academies of Science and Medicine, he is the author or co- – author of 350 scientific publications and more than 750 patents according to the Institut Pasteur. His work on HIV will take him to the top: the Nobel Prize for Medicine, which he will share in 1988 with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. His ramblings and sweeping assertions earned him a controversial end to his career, gradually being ostracized from the scientific community.
the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
Born in Indre and very early attracted by science, Luc Montagnier as a teenager saw Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a shock and turned to medicine, first in Poitiers then in Paris. Then it was the CNRS and the first contacts with virology in England, where he discovered, in 1963, the mechanism of replication of RNA viruses and where he highlighted a new specific property of cancer cells: their ability to grow in suspension. in a gel medium. Back in Paris, at the Institut Curie, he worked on both the mechanism of action and purification of interferons and that of cancerization by viruses.