The French virologist Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008, together with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, after having achieved isolate human immunodeficiency virus for the first time (HIV), which causes the disease AIDS, died in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Paris) on Tuesday at the age of 89, French media announced Thursday. Montagnier received, in the year 2000, the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research, shared with Robert Gallo.
Between 1980 and 1984, he and his team from the Pasteur Institute of Paris isolated numerous human retroviruses from patients with sexual infections, hemophiliacs, mothers who had transmitted it to their children, and infected persons in blood transfusions.
In 1983 they managed to isolate a virus that they initially called VAL (virus associated with lymphadenopathy) and that was later identified as the virus that causes AIDS and ended up being called HIV. The Nobel Prize in Medicine was shared with Harald zur Hausen, discoverer of the human papilloma virus that cause cervical cancer.
In his later years, Montagnier’s prestige had been clouded by his anti-vaccine position.
A 20th century discovery
The identification of HIV in 1983 was one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. The AIDS disease was claiming the lives of people all over the world (it has since caused more than 35 million deaths). A year later, the American team Robert Gallo confirmed the discovery of the virus and that it was the cause of AIDS.
In fact, for many years there was a strong dispute over who had first isolated the virus. Finally, it was concluded that Montagnier had isolated HIV, but that was Gallo’s team showed that the virus was the cause of AIDS.
An outcast of the scientific community
Montagnier, despite his achievements, has become in recent years a pariah of the scientific community for his criticism of vaccines. In fact, he went so far as to say that the covid-19 vaccines were creating new variants of the virus, something that is not possible, among other things, because the first variants emerged before the massive vaccination campaigns. The Frenchman went so far as to say that “the unvaccinated will save humanity.”
Related news
As the French outlet ‘Libération’ recalls, this drift of an eminent scientist began in the 2000s, when he defended the fermented papaya as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease. In 2009, a year after receiving the Nobel Prize, Montagnier defended the idea that a good immune system can wipe out HIV “in a few weeks” and what a good diet rich in antioxidants You can be exposed to the virus without becoming chronically infected.
He also said that the autism spectrum disorders They are bacterial in origin and can be treated with antibiotics. In 2017, she defended several anti-vaccine theses, linking vaccination to sudden infant death syndrome, something that has long been invalidated by scientific research. Academics of medicine and science then criticized him for “disseminating, outside the field of his competence, dangerous messages for health, in defiance of the ethics that should govern science and medicine.”