The Nobel Prize winner and French discoverer of the AIDS pathogen HIV, Luc Montagnier, is dead. The doctor died at the age of 89, as the Ministry of Science in Paris announced on Thursday.
Montagnier received the 2008 Nobel Prize together with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
Both had isolated the immunodeficiency virus in samples from seriously ill patients at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the early 1980s.
The discovery also paved the way for modern AIDS drugs.
Montagnier had long argued with the American virologist Robert Gallo about the discovery of HIV and patents.
However, the Nobel Committee assumed that it could be taken for granted that the discovery had been made in France.
Montagnier had applied for the patent for the first AIDS test six months before Gallo, who, however, had it granted earlier by the American patent office.
The dispute was not settled until 1994.
In recent years, Montagnier has made a name for himself with controversial theses in the scientific community that have eroded his earlier reputation.
During the Corona crisis, for example, he suspected that researchers had created the virus on purpose.