Professor Luc Montagnier, who received the Nobel prize from
medicine in 2008, died Tuesday at the age of 89 at the American hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, learns 20 Minutes this Thursday at the town hall of the commune,
confirming information from Release. The former researcher at the CNRS and the Institut Pasteur had found himself sidelined from the scientific community in recent years, claiming in particular that
vaccines could be linked to risks of sudden infant death syndrome, a claim
without scientific support.
Since the crisis of Covid-19he had multiplied the statements contradicted by scientific knowledge – several of which were the subject of articles by the
rubrique Fake Off from 20 Minutes –, making him a respected figure among opponents of anti-Covid vaccines and the
sanitary pass. It is also the France-Soir site, which he had approached in recent years, which first reported the death of the professor on his Twitter account on Wednesday.
Only son, born in Berry in 1932, Luc Montagnier began by taking an interest in virology and entered the CNRS in 1960, where he discovered in 1963 “the mechanism of replication of RNA viruses”, remember the institution. From 1972 to 2000, the scientist headed the viral oncology unit at the Pasteur Institute. In particular, he turned to oncology because he had seen his grandfather suffer and die of cancer.
he confided when receiving his Nobel Prize in Medicine.
He had received this award in 2008 with the virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for work on the discovery of HIV, the virus at the origin of the pagein 1983.
Luc Montagnier was “the author or co-author of 350 scientific publications and more than 750 patents,” According to the Pasteur Institute. He had also taken part in the creation of several biotechnology companies in France and the United States.
His hazardous statements had estranged him from the scientific community in recent years. In 2017, after comments by the professor on vaccination, a hundred members of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medicine signed a petition accusing him to “disseminate, outside the scope of its competence, messages dangerous to health, in defiance of the ethics which must govern science and medicine”. On January 15, he took part in a demonstration in Milan against the “green pass”, the equivalent of the health pass in application with our transalpine neighbors.