Professor Luc Montagnier died on Tuesday, February 8, at the American hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Hauts-de-Seine), AFP learned Thursday from the mayor of the city Jean-Christophe Fromantin.

Rejected late for dubious theories, he will forever be associated with the discovery of the AIDS virus which earned him the prestigious Nobel Prize in Medicine.

His controversial remarks against anti-Covid vaccines had put him back in the spotlight, attracting him the sympathy of antivax and discrediting him a little more with the scientific community.

"I have always looked for the unusual. I find it difficult to work on an already established current", confided this biologist specializing in viruses in a documentary devoted to work which he himself described as "sulphurous" on the "memory of water", broadcast on France 5 in July 2014.

Thin metal glasses, bright eyes and still baby face at 80 years old, the virologist described himself as a "marginal" in a white coat despite his international laurels, with the Nobel Prize awarded in 2008 for a discovery made a quarter of a century earlier.

 "4H Disease"

You have to immerse yourself in the atmosphere of the 1980s to understand the fever that had gripped a handful of laboratories around the world: to discover as quickly as possible the origin of a strange illness that was called, for lack of a better , "disease of 4H" (because it seems to mainly attack homosexuals, heroin addicts, Haitians and hemophiliacs).

Born on August 8, 1932 in Chabris in Indre (central France), the virologist Luc Montagnier directed since 1972 at the Institut Pasteur a laboratory specializing in retroviruses and oncoviruses (responsible for cancer).

At the beginning of 1983, he isolated with his "associates" Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann a new retrovirus which he provisionally baptized LAV (Lymphadenopathy Associated Virus) from a sample taken by Dr. Willy Rozenbaum from a young patient, a homosexual who lived in New York.

It is for him the "causal" agent of the new disease.

But the discovery is greeted with "skepticism", in particular by the American Robert Gallo, a great specialist in retroviruses.

"For a year, we knew we had the right virus (...) but no one believed us and our publications were refused", said Montagnier 30 years later.

In April 1984, Margaret Heckler, US Secretary of State for Health announced that Robert Gallo had found the "probable" cause of AIDS, a retrovirus called HTLV-III.

But the latter turns out to be strictly identical to the LAV found earlier by Montagnier's team...

"Co-discoverers"

The controversy swells: who is the real discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Montagnier or Gallo?

The question is important because it makes it possible to settle the question of royalties linked to screening tests.

The dispute reached a provisional and diplomatic conclusion in 1987: the United States and France signed a compromise in which Gallo and Montagnier were officially described as "co-discoverers".

The real epilogue comes 20 years later, with the awarding of the Nobel for the discovery of HIV, not to Gallo but to Montagnier and his partner Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.

Jean-Claude Chermann will be forgotten by the prestigious jury.

A few years later, for the 30th anniversary of his discovery, Professor Montagnier drew up a mixed assessment of this epic for AFP: "We have not succeeded in eradicating the epidemic or even the infection since we do not know cure someone who is infected".

Antiretroviral drugs can effectively muzzle HIV but not completely eliminate it from the body of infected people.

"Antivax"

After leading an AIDS and retrovirus department at Pasteur from 1991 to 1997, then teaching at Queens College in New York until 2001, Professor Montagnier took to the crossroads of scientific research and gradually became ostracized from the scientific community.

He defends the "microbial track", however subject to caution, to explain autism.

It takes up the unanimously rejected thesis of the French researcher Jacques Benveniste according to which water retains the imprint (the "memory") of substances that are no longer there.

He supports theories on the emission of electromagnetic waves by DNA, promotes papaya as a remedy for certain diseases.

His repeated positions against vaccines earned him in November 2017 the scathing and official condemnation of 106 members of the Academies of Science and Medicine.

Le Figaro describes his career as a "slow scientific shipwreck".

During the Covid-19 pandemic, he illustrated himself again, affirming that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was manipulated in the laboratory with the addition of "sequences, in particular, of HIV" and that vaccines are responsible for the appearance of variants.

These theses, fought by virologists and epidemiologists, have thrown a little more discredit on a scientist who has become a "pariah" among his peers.

With AFP

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