Sad news. Tuesday February 8, 2022 in the evening, Professor Luc Montagnier died at the age of 89 at the American Hospital in Neuilly, in Ile-de-France. A disappearance announced two days later, this Thursday, February 10, 2022, by our colleagues from Release. The information is confirmed by the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), which mentions his death certificate with the Parisian. For the time being, the reasons for his hospitalization have not been revealed.
Everyone in science is in mourning. Luc Montagnier, retired biologist, was a member of the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS. He had also landed a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, the cause of AIDS), with Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. A fine career recognized by the profession.
However, from the end of the 2000s, the positions taken by the professor were increasingly controversial, leading to the marginalization of Luc Montagnier from the scientific community. For example, he had evoked theories on the emission of electromagnetic waves by DNA, proposed to cure Pope John Paul II, then suffering from Parkinson’s disease, with fermented papaya or even assured that antibiotics could be used to treat autism.
In 2017, it was about vaccination that Luc Montagnier was controversial. The professor thus indicated, without evidence, that certain vaccines presented a risk “to poison little by little the whole population“. And more recently, in the midst of a health crisis, the controversial biologist believed that Covid-19 was the result of human manipulation and contained “aids virus sequences“.