Professor Luc Montagnier, co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in 1983, and Nobel Prize in Medicine 2008, is dead, we learned this Thursday, February 10. He was 89 years old.
Biologist and virologist by training, Luc Montagnier, born on August 18, 1932 in Chabris, in Indre, was known in particular for having been professor emeritus at the Pasteur Institute, in which he directed the viral oncology unit from 1972 to 2000, but also director emeritus of research at the National Center for Scientific Research and professor at New York University.
Professor Luc Montagnier had obtained one of the most recognized distinctions in the scientific world. On October 6, 2008, he was co-winner with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
It was his role in the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that had enabled him to win the holy grail and to integrate the Academies of Science and Medicine.
But his idyll with the scientific community had withered the following year. The start of a series of controversies. In 2009, Professor Montagnier said that a strong immune system is enough to prevent a subject from contracting HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS. A position that had appalled many scientists at the time.
The following year, the biologist against the current had supported another theory far from being unanimous. He had claimed to believe in the theory of the memory of water defended by Jacques Benveniste in the late 1980s.
The water memory theory refers to the hypothesis according to which water retains an imprint of certain properties of the substances with which it has been in contact. But this theory was invalidated by several studies carried out in the following years.
Many years after these first controversies, Luc Montagnier again made headlines by taking a stand this time against the compulsory administration of vaccines in France. He had accused these preventive remedies of “little by little poisoning the entire population that will succeed us”.
His words had earned him, again, a wave of criticism from the scientific community. Thus, 106 academicians of science and medicine had written a “firm call to order” to their colleague. “We, academicians of science and/or academicians of medicine, cannot accept from one of our colleagues that he uses his Nobel Prize to disseminate, outside the field of his competence, messages dangerous to health”, they had castigated.
His last controversial outing occurred in April 2020. In an interview with Why Doctor?, the professor explained that he did not believe that Covid-19 came from contamination in a wild animal market in Wuhan. “It’s a beautiful legend, it’s not possible. The virus comes out of a laboratory in Wuhan,” he said.
If his words had caused an outcry, it is nevertheless clear that in August 2021, this theory returned to the forefront by the WHO.
A year after the words of Luc Montagnier, Peter Embarek, head of the delegation of international scientists sent to China by the WHO to detect the origin of Covid-19 had thus also declared, in a program on Danish television, that the coronavirus could indeed come from a laboratory in Wuhan.
However, this thesis is still largely rejected by most scientists. The theory that SARS-COV-2 is the result of genetic manipulation has already been denied according to analyzes of the genome of the virus communicated by the Chinese, especially since researchers around the world have since been able to isolate and analyze them. themselves this virus from samples taken from patients on their own territory.