Professor Luc Montagnier died on Tuesday, learned franceinfo Thursday February 10, from the mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), Jean-Christophe Fromentin, who confirmed the filing of a death certificate. Aged 89, Luc Montagnier won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, shared with Professor Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, for her work on the discovery of HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS. The FranceSoir site announced his death on Wednesday.
A member of the Institut Pasteur between 1972 and 2000, he made history by helping to isolate a new retrovirus in 1983 from a sample taken from a young homosexual patient who had stayed in New York. At the time, the discovery was greeted with “skepticism” : “Nobody believed us and our publications were refused”said Luc Montagnier, thirty years later.
In 1984, the United States announced that an American researcher had found the cause “likely” of AIDS, a retrovirus that turns out to be strictly identical to that found earlier by the French team. To settle the question of royalties linked to screening tests, the two men were officially qualified as “co-discoverers” of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1987, before the Nobel committee decided the debate in favor of Luc Montagnier two decades later.
Subsequently, Professor Montagnier drew up a mixed assessment of this discovery. “We have not succeeded in eradicating the epidemic or even the infection, since we do not know how to cure someone who is infected”, did he declare. Antiretroviral drugs can effectively muzzle HIV but not completely eliminate it from the body of infected people.
In recent years, the professor had been the subject of several disavowals within the scientific community, including since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, following statements hostile to vaccination. Fine metallic glasses, bright eyes and always a baby face, the virologist described himself as a “marginal” in a white coat, despite his international laurels.
After the announcement of the death of this “French pioneer in medical research in virology”Emmanuel Macron hailed “the major contribution of Luc Montagnier to the fight against AIDS, which remains one of the great medical and scientific challenges of the 21st century”.