Paris, Feb. 11 (BNA): French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize for discovering HIV and spreading false claims about the coronavirus, has died at the age of 89, local government officials in France said.
Montagnier died, Tuesday, at the American Hospital in Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the western suburb of the capital, the region’s city council said. No other details were released, according to the Associated Press.
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Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine with his colleague Françoise Barry-Sinoussi.
French President Emmanuel Macron in a written statement on Thursday praised Montagnier’s “key contribution” to the fight against AIDS, and expressed his condolences to his family.
Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France. According to his biography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris.
He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly developing field of molecular biology.
He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became Head of the Department of Virology at the Pasteur Institute in 1972.
“My involvement with AIDS began in 1982, when information spread that a transmissible agent – possibly a virus – could be the source of this new mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.
In 1983, a working group led by Barry Senussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that later became known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused AIDS.
American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered the same virus around the same time, prompting a dispute over who should take credit.
The United States and France settled a patent dispute over an AIDS test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as the discoverer of the virus, Gallo as the creator of the first test.
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