French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said.
Montagnier died on Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area’s municipality said. No other details have been released.
A virologist, he led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes Aids, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barre-Sinoussi.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute on Thursday to Montagnier’s “major contribution” to the fight against Aids and expressed condolences to his family.
Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.
According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, he studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris.
Montagnier said scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.
He joined the National Centre for Scientific Research in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.
“My involvement in Aids began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.
In 1983, a working group led by him and Mr Barre-Sinoussi at the Pasteur Institute isolated the virus that would later become known as HIV and was able to explain how it caused Aids.
American scientist Robert Gallo claimed to have found the same virus at almost exactly the same time, sparking a disagreement over who should be given the credit.
The US and France settled a dispute over the patent for an Aids test in 1987. Montagnier was later credited as discovering the virus and Mr Gallo as the creator of the first test.
Since the end of the 2000s, Montagnier started expressing views devoid of a scientific basis. His opinions led him to be shunned by much of the international scientific community.
As Covid-19 spread around the globe and conspiracy theories flourished, her was among those behind some of the misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus.
In 2020 he told French news broadcaster CNews that the coronavirus did not originate in nature and was manipulated.
Experts who have looked at the genome sequence of the virus have said Montagnier’s statement was incorrect.
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Last year, he claimed in a French documentary that Covid-19 vaccines led to the creation of coronavirus variants.
Experts say variants found around the globe began emerging long before vaccines were widely available, AP reported
They said evidence suggested variants evolved as a result of prolonged viral infections in the population and not vaccines, which are designed to prevent such infections.
This year, Montagnier delivered a speech at a protest against vaccine certificates in Milan, Italy.
He was emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute and emeritus research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research.
Montagnier received several awards, including France’s highest decoration, the Legion of Honour.
