Luc Montagnier ( , ; 18 August 1932 – 8 February 2022) was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the lab-leak theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory. Such a claim has been rejected by other virologists.

Early life and education

Montagnier was born in Chabris in central France.

Career

In 1960, Montagnier moved to Carshalton, UK as a postdoctoral fellow at the now defunct Virus Research Unit of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom). In 1963, he moved to the Glasgow Institute of Virology. He developed a soft agar culture medium to culture viruses. Rozenbaum had suggested at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses. Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum's AIDS patients in 1983 and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy. They named it "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV, since it was not then clear that it was the cause of AIDS, and published their findings in the journal Science on 20 May 1983. Because of the timing of the discoveries, whether Montagnier's or Gallo's group was first to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an acrimonious dispute. HIV isolates usually have a high degree of variability because the virus mutates rapidly. In comparison, the first two-human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) isolates, Lai/LAV (formerly LAV, isolated at the Pasteur Institute) and Lai/IIIB (formerly HTLV-IIIB, isolated from a pooled culture at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute) were strikingly similar in sequence, suggesting that the two isolates were in fact the same, and likely from the same source.

In November 1990, the Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health attempted to clear up the matter by commissioning a group at Roche to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. The group, led by American epidemiologist Sheng-Yung Chang, examined archival specimens and concluded in Nature in 1993 that the American sample in fact originated from the French lab.

Chang determined that the French group's LAV was a virus from one patient that had contaminated a culture from another. On request, Montagnier's group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. It then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working.

Before the 1993 publication of Chang's results, Gallo's lab was accused and initially found guilty of "minor misconduct" by the Office of Scientific Integrity in 1991, and then by the newly created Office of Research Integrity in 1992 for the misappropriation of a sample of HIV produced at the Pasteur Institute. The subsequent publication in 1993 of Chang's investigation cleared Gallo's lab of the charges, although his reputation had already been tainted by the accusations.

Today it is agreed that Montagnier's group first isolated HIV, but Gallo's group is credited with discovering that the virus causes AIDS and with generating much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo's lab for growing T cells in the laboratory. When Montagnier's group first published their discovery, they said HIV's role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."

The question of whether the true discoverers of the virus were French or American was more than a matter of prestige. A US government patent for the AIDS test, filed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and based on what was claimed to be Gallo's identification of the virus, was at stake. In 1987, both governments attempted to end the dispute by arranging to split the prestige of the discovery and the proceeds from the patent 50–50, naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers.

It was not until French President François Mitterrand and American President Ronald Reagan met in person that the major issues were ironed out. The scientists finally agreed to share credit for the discovery of HIV, and in 1986, both the French and the US names (LAV and HTLV-III) were dropped in favor of the new term human immunodeficiency virus (virus de l'immunodéficience humaine, abbreviated HIV or VIH) (Coffin, 1986). They concluded that the origin of the HIV-1 Lai/IIIB isolate discovered by Gallo was the same as that discovered by Montagnier (but not known by Montagnier to cause AIDS). This compromise allowed Montagnier and Gallo to end their feud and collaborate with each other again, writing a chronology that appeared in Nature that year.

Personal life and death

In 1961, Montagnier married Dorothea Ackerman, and they had three children. He died in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 8 February 2022, at the age of 89.

Awards and honors

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV. They shared the Prize with Harald zur Hausen, who discovered that human papilloma viruses can cause cervical cancer. Montagnier said he was "surprised" that Robert Gallo was not also recognized by the Nobel Committee: "It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I'm very sorry for Robert Gallo." He was a recipient of the Lasker Award and the Scheele Award (1986), the Louis-Jeantet Prize for medicine (1986), the Gairdner Award (1987), the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement (1987), King Faisal International Prize (1993) (known as the Arab Nobel Prize), and the Prince of Asturias Award (2000). He was also a member of the Académie Nationale de Médecine, and was awarded the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) from Whittier College in 2010.

Controversies

Electromagnetic signals from DNA

In 2009, Montagnier published two controversial independent research studies, one of which was entitled "Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences". Jeff Reimers, of the University of Sydney, said that if its conclusions are true, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry". and similar research on electromagnetic detection of HIV RNA in the blood of AIDS patients treated by antiretroviral therapy.

Homeopathy

On 28 June 2010, Montagnier spoke at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany, "where 60 Nobel prize winners had gathered, along with 700 other scientists, to discuss the latest breakthroughs in medicine, chemistry and physics."

When asked by Canada's CBC Marketplace program if his work was indeed a theoretical basis for homeopathy as homeopaths had claimed, Montagnier replied that one "cannot extrapolate it to the products used in homeopathy".

Responses, criticisms, and interviews

The homeopathy paper met with harsh criticism for not being peer-reviewed, and its claims unsubstantiated by modern mainstream conventions of physics and chemistry. In response to Montagnier's statement that the generally unfavorable response is due to the "non-understanding or misunderstanding of the breakthrough findings", blogger Andy Lewis has written that he has found it difficult to assert what the paper "actually claims", saying: "The paper ... lacks any rigour. ... important experimental steps are described dismissively in a sentence and little attempt is made to describe the detail of the work". While homeopaths claim his research as support for homeopathy, many scientists have greeted it with scorn and harsh criticism. of a new journal which published his research, Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences.

A 12 January 2011 New Scientist editorial described the controversial nature of the research, while also noting how many researchers "reacted with disbelief", with chemist and university president Gary Schuster comparing it to "pathological science".

On 25 May 2012, he gave the keynote address

COVID-19 pandemic

In 2020, Montagnier argued that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, was man-made in a laboratory and that it might have been the result of an attempt to create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. His allegation came after the United States had launched a probe into whether the virus came from a laboratory. According to Montagnier, the "presence of elements of HIV and germ of malaria in the genome of coronavirus is highly suspect and the characteristics of the virus could not have arisen naturally." Montagnier's conclusions were rejected as hasty by the scientific community, considering the gene sequences were common among similar organisms; Bioinformatics analyses show that the common sequences are short, that their similarity is insufficient to support the hypothesis of common origin, and that the identified sequences were independent insertions which occurred at varied points during the evolution of coronaviruses.

In a 2021 interview with the French media group "Hold Up", Montagnier claimed that the use of vaccinations for COVID was steering the evolution of new strains, and that the process of antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE) would cause vaccinated individuals to suffer more strongly. The former claim had no obvious basis in fact, while ADE had only ever been conclusively demonstrated for dengue virus infections, and not for COVID-19.

For his defense of such anti-scientific views, Montagnier has been cited as an example of the phenomenon called Nobel disease.

See also

  • And the Band Played On, a book written about the discovery of AIDS
  • And the Band Played On, a film based on the book
  • History of RNA biology
  • HIV trial in Libya
  • List of RNA biologists

References

</references>

  • The discovery of the AIDS virus in 1983 – Official position of the Pasteur Institute.
  • including the Nobel lecture "25 Years after HIV Discovery: Prospects for Cure and Vaccine" (7 December 2008)
  • PROFILE: Luc Montagnier, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi – AIDS pioneers
  • Luc Montagnier's obituary on Nature