The doctor and researcher was responsible at the Institut Pasteur of the team who has brought the AIDS response to the team. His heterodox positions had earned him the disapproval of his peers in recent years. He died on February 8 at the age of 89.
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Doctor and researcher, Nobel Medicine Award (2008), Luc Montagnier died, Tuesday, February 8 at the age of 89. The news of his death was circulating on social networks since Wednesday, the information was confirmed on Thursday, with the release by the town hall of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Awarded by the Stockholm jury for his contribution to the discovery, in 1983 at the Pasteur Institute, the Virus responsible for AIDS, actor of the fight against this disease, he subsequently multiplied heterodox positions in scientific matter and medical, aroused consternation and reprobation in his peers.
Luc Montagnier was born on August 18, 1932 in Chabris (Indre), in a modest family – his father was an accountant and his mother at home. After high school in Châtellerault, then of medicine in Poitiers then Paris, he opts for a career in virology research, captivated by the role of RNA in the machinery of certain viruses.
After a stay in the United Kingdom, where he updates the role of this molecule in replication mechanisms and works on the oncogens, he returns to Paris, at the Curie Institute. It shows that a retrovirus responsible for rus sarcoma integrates its genetic heritage into the DNA of infected cells.
The Pasteur Institute invites it in 1972 to create a unity of viral oncology within the new Department of Virology. This is where Jean-Claude Chermann and his associate Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who have an expertise on the animal retroviruses, join him in 1977. The sequel is now part of the story.
Franco-American iron arm
In early 1983, the clinical doctor Willy Rozenbaum entrusts them with a ganglion taken from a young patient suffering from a disease originally mysterious – it will later be called AIDS, for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. May 20, 1983, Luc Montagnier is the last author – a rank designating the one who supervises the work – an article published in Science, of which Françoise Barré-Sinoussi is the first signatory – generally the labor officer “to the bench” . This article describes a retrovirus identified in the tissues brought by Willy Rozenbaum, and suspected of being the causal agent of the new disease. In the same science issue, Robert Gallo’s team at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), offers another virus (HTLV) as a whichestic AIDS manager.
This is the beginning of a long battle in paternity around the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), putting in sockets Luc Montagnier, who then becomes in France the figure of research against the research against the research against the AIDS, and his counterpart Robert Gallo. The challenge is not just a quarrel of academic anteriority. The AIDS virus screening test market is at the heart of a Franco-American iron arm that is played around patents. A first agreement will intervene between the two parties in December 1987 under the auspices of Jacques Chirac and Ronald Reagan: In Europe, the royalties will go to the Institut Pasteur, in the United States, they will be shared between the two teams.
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