In the last ten years, the scientifically unfounded words of the French biologist had aroused many polemics. He died on February 8 at the age of 89.
Le Monde
Professor Luc Montagnier, coder of the AIDS virus and Nobel Prize of Medicine 2008, died Tuesday, February 8 in Neuilly-sur-Seine at the age of 89, confirmed the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine ( Hauts-de-Seine) to several media, including Liberation in the first place. The announcement of his death had been announced Wednesday on social networks, without confirmation until the next day.
Born on August 18, 1932 in Chabris (Indre), Luc Montagnier is appointed Assistant at the Faculty of Sciences of Paris in 1955, before focusing his research on animal viruses, including those whose genetic heritage consists of RNA. and on the links that may exist between these viruses and the cancer processes. After several internships abroad, he created in 1972 the unity of viral oncology in the new Department of Virology of the Institut Pasteur de Paris. In 1983, he discovered, with his collaborators Jean-Claude Chermann and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, the AIDS virus. He will leave the direction of his department in 1997, at age 65, to join Queens College, New York, for a few years. In 2008, it is the consecration for Professor Montagnier and his collaborators: the Nobel Medicine Award is given to them for their work on HIV.
“out of the field of his skills”
Since about ten years, the jets of Professor Montagnier, less and less scientific, had aroused astonishment, or even public denunciations on the part of his confreres. Among other statements, the coder of HIV had thus asserted that the water had a “memory” of the compounds with which it has been in contact and that Africans would have fewer problems with AIDS if they had more balanced food. He had, moreover, proposed to heal the Pope John Paul II, Parkinson’s sick, with fermented papaya or to treat autism with antibiotics.
In November 2017, it was his speeches against the mandatory vaccination of children who arouse a public denunciation of 106 academic medicines. “We can not accept one of our colleagues that he uses his Nobel Prize to disseminate, out of the scope of his skills, dangerous messages for health, disregarding ethics who must preside over science and medicine, “they wrote.
In April 2020, on the CNEWS plateau, Mr. Montagnier had argued that SARS-COV-2 had been manufactured on the basis of HIV. A statement that was not supported by any serious scientific study.