The French virologist Luc Montagnier was a protagonist in one of the most acrimonious scientific disputes of the late 20th century. The disagreement, with the American scientist Robert Gallo, over who had discovered HIV and its role in causing Aids, was resolved only after the intervention of the US and French presidents, Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac. In 2008 Montagnier and his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi were jointly awarded half of the Nobel prize for medicine. The rest of the prize went to Harald zur Hausen, for his unrelated discovery that human papillomaviruses cause cervical and other cancers.
In later life Montagnier, who has died aged 89, alienated his own supporters after he promoted a range of fringe theories. He was a champion of the anti-vax movement, arguing that diseases including HIV could be cured by diet. When the Covid pandemic began, he claimed that Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, had originated in a lab experiment to combine coronavirus and HIV. He told viewers on French TV that vaccination was an “enormous mistake” that would promote the spread of new variants.
Reports of the Aids epidemic first appeared in the early 1980s, as gay men fell ill with a mysterious immunodeficiency syndrome. Barré-Sinoussi was working in Montagnier’s virology unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France’s premier biomedical research institute. In 1983 she isolated a retrovirus, which they called lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV), from the blood of patients with Aids. With typical scientific caution, their report concluded that it “may be involved in several pathological syndromes, including Aids”.
Gallo, working at the US National Cancer Institute, had meanwhile identified a family of cancer-causing immunodeficiency retroviruses – RNA viruses that can insert a DNA copy of their genetic material into a host cell – that he called human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV). In 1984 he announced in a series of high-profile papers that a new member of this family, HTLV-III, could definitively be identified as the cause of Aids. The US government patented the blood test he had developed to detect antibodies to the virus before symptoms developed, which made it possible to screen donated blood.
The row blew up not only because HTLV-III proved to be near-identical to LAV (and not closely related to HTLV-I and II), but also because material used in Gallo’s studies included samples that Montagnier had supplied from the Pasteur Institute in September 1983. Moreover, the Pasteur had applied for a US patent on blood tests for LAV four months earlier than Gallo; it sued the US government for its share of the proceeds.
Before the case came to court, negotiation between the US and French governments led to a resolution that the two scientists should be equally credited with the discovery, both named on the patents, and that the millions of dollars in income from the blood test should be shared between their two institutions and an international Aids research foundation. The parties also agreed to name the virus human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In 2002 Gallo and Montagnier published a joint paper acknowledging each other’s role: Montagnier’s lab discovered HIV, and Gallo’s proved it caused Aids. When Gallo was excluded from the Nobel prize, Montagnier declared himself as surprised as anyone.
The dispute, against the backdrop of the human catastrophe of the Aids epidemic itself, proved to be such a cause célèbre that HBO made a TV film, And the Band Played On (1993), based on the 1987 book by Randy Shilts, in which Montagnier was played by the Belgian actor Patrick Bauchau and Gallo by the American Alan Alda.
Montagnier was born in Chabris in the Indre region of France, and grew up near Poitiers, the only child of Marianne (nee Rousselet) and Antoine Montagnier, an accountant. After training in medicine at the universities of Poitiers and Paris, Montagnier began work on retroviruses in the UK, at the Medical Research Council Virus Research Unit in Carshalton, south London, and at Glasgow University, before setting up his own lab at the Pasteur Institute in 1972.
In 1993 he established and led the World Foundation for Aids Research and Prevention. After the HIV controversy had substantially died down, he spent three years heading the centre for molecular and cellular biology at Queen’s College, City University of New York, before returning to the Pasteur Institute.
In 2009, the year after he won the Nobel prize, he stunned scientific colleagues by publishing (in a journal he founded and edited himself) the claim that electromagnetic signals could be detected in water that had previously held DNA or RNA from viruses and bacteria. This was a variation on the “memory of water” theory that the discredited immunologist Jacques Benveniste put forward as an explanation for the efficacy of homeopathy. Montagnier also claimed that autism was caused by infection and could be cured by long-term antibiotic treatments. Scientists reacted with deep scepticism.
From 2010 Montagnier spent a few years working at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, where, he said, they were more “open-minded” about his ideas. In 2017 more than 100 members of the French academies of science and medicine published an open letter condemning him for spreading “dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge” after he opposed the extension of his country’s childhood vaccination programme.
Montagnier married Dorothea Ackermann in 1961. She survives him, along with their three children, Anne-Marie, Francine and Jean-Luc.