- French virologist and Nobel Prize winner in medicine Luc Montagnier has died at the age of 89.
- After years of dispute, he is regarded as the discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus HIV, which causes AIDS.
- According to official information, Montagnier died on Tuesday in the presence of his children in a hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.
Luc Montagnier received the 2008 Nobel Prize together with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. Both had isolated the AIDS-triggering immune deficiency virus HIV in samples from seriously ill patients at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the early 1980s. This discovery was, among other things, the prerequisite for modern AIDS drugs.
Montagnier had long argued with the US 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 applied for the patent for the first AIDS test six months before Gallo.
Patent dispute only settled in 1994
However, Gallo got it granted by the US Patent Office earlier than Montagnier. The dispute was not settled until 1994.
In recent years, Montagnier has made a name for himself with controversial theses in science. During the corona crisis, for example, he suspected that researchers had created the virus on purpose.