Luc Montagnier: French virologist, co-discoverer of HIV passes away 

Luc Montagnier, the French virologist credited as a co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), has passed away. He was 89.

Local news site FranceSoir reported he died on Tuesday in Neuilly-sur-Seine "surrounded by his children".

Born in 1932, Montagnier began working at Paris's Faculty of Sciences in 1955 and moved to the Pasteur Institute in 1972, and after his work on HIV led the foundation before moving to Queens College, City University of New York in 1997.

French media first reported that he had died at the American hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on 8 February. Local authorities later officially confirmed his death.

The virologist was jointly awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for his work in isolating the virus that causes Aids.

The discovery of HIV began in Paris on January 3, 1983. That was the day that Montagnier (pronounced mon-tan-YAY), who directed the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute, received a piece of lymph node that had been removed from a 33-year-old man with AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome.  

Montagnier and his team—including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi managed to isolate HIV in the lymph node of an Aids patient and published news of the discovery in the journal Science in 1983.

The scientist was lauded for this work, but later criticised for unscientific claims about autism (complex, lifelong developmental disability) and Covid-19.  

Take a look at Françoise Barré-Sinoussi's lab notes from 1983 when she and Luc Montagnier discovered Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS.

In 1985, the first commercial blood test to detect HIV became available. #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/SOZrepDQTW

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) February 6, 2022

The virologist first began working on the virus in the early 1980s while at France's Pasteur Institute, a non-profit research foundation.

In the same edition, US scientist Robert Gallo published similar findings, and later concluded that the virus caused Aids.

However, the dispute over who first identified HIV caused years of heated debate.

Robert Gallo admitted in 1991 that the virus he found came from the Pasteur Institute the year before, and the two men publicly agreed in 2002 that Montagnier's team discovered HIV—Yet Robert first showed its role in causing Aids.   

However, when Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi were awarded the Nobel Prize in 2008 for their work— alongside Harald zur Hausen for his work on cervical cancer—the committee controversially did not mention Gallo.