Luc Montagnier, Nobel-winning virologist who co-discovered HIV, dies at 89

When he and others at Pasteur examined a sample in January 1983, studying a slice of swollen lymph node from a fashion designer who exhibited early signs of the disease, they were surprised to find what appeared to be an entirely new kind of retrovirus. It was unusually potent, lying hidden in white blood cells before flaring up, replicating and killing the cells that had enabled it to grow.

The lab of Dr. Montagnier, who was 89 when he died Feb. 8 at a hospital in the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, had discovered HIV, the drug-resistant virus that was later found to cause AIDS. Originally labeled a “gay plague,” the disease ballooned into a public health crisis as Dr. Montagnier and his team fought for recognition from the scientific community, which ignored and sometimes scorned their early research.

Ultimately, the work done by Dr. Montagnier and his colleagues — including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who detected telltale viral activity in the original sample — paved the way for an HIV blood test, spurred the development of AIDS drugs and therapies, and earned the two Pasteur scientists a share of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2008.

Dr. Montagnier’s reputation later plummeted as colleagues accused him of spreading pseudoscience and threatening public health through his opposition to vaccination mandates. But for decades, he remained best known for his HIV research and his work to prevent AIDS. Much to his dismay, his early findings plunged him into a decade-long battle for scientific glory, national pride and millions of dollars in blood test patent royalties, as he and an American team led by National Cancer Institute researcher Robert C. Gallo vied over who discovered what and when.

Amid allegations of scientific misconduct, self-serving behavior and outright theft, the dispute was formally resolved only with help from President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, with both sides claiming a share of the credit.

While Gallo was long cited as a key leader in HIV research, credited with definitively linking the virus to AIDS, the Nobel committee sought to honor the “discoverers” of the virus in awarding the prize to Dr. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi.

The saga cast a long shadow over one of the great success stories in modern science: the transformation of AIDS from a death sentence into a treatable chronic illness, in a matter of years rather than decades.

“HIV has generated a novel pandemic,” the Nobel committee said in 2008, announcing that half of the medicine prize would go to Dr. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi. The other half of the prize was given to German virologist Harald zur Hausen, for discovering that human papillomavirus can cause cervical cancer.

“Never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity,” the committee added. “Successful antiretroviral therapy results in life expectancies for persons with HIV infection now reaching levels similar to those of uninfected people.”

By the time of the announcement, more than 25 million people had died of AIDS-related illnesses, and an estimated 33 million more were living with HIV. By all accounts, the disease’s toll would have been far greater were it not for advances in virology spearheaded by Dr. Montagnier and Gallo in the 1970s and early ’80s.

Though their personalities were nearly opposite — Dr. Montagnier was understated and sedate, Gallo fiery and blunt — they conducted influential, complementary research into retroviruses at a time when epidemic diseases were considered more or less extinct, vanquished by vaccines and antibiotics.

Human retroviruses were largely written off as a fantasy until 1980, one year before AIDS was first reported in the United States, when Gallo identified a leukemia-causing virus he dubbed HTLV. By the time he started examining reports of AIDS, he had found a second form of the HTLV virus and began to suspect that the new disease was caused by a third.

Dr. Montagnier’s research pointed toward a cause that was unrelated to HTLV. He published his lab’s initial findings in a May 1983 issue of Science, giving a basic description of what he called lymphadenopathy associated virus, or LAV — a reference to the swollen lymph nodes in which it was found. Its role in AIDS, wrote Dr. Montagnier and his colleagues, “remains to be determined.”

The article received little attention. But four months later, when Dr. Montagnier described his work at a conference of top virologists at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., Pasteur had mounting evidence that the virus was indeed the cause of AIDS. Dr. Montagnier was reportedly met with derision during a question-and-answer session.

The Pasteur Institute’s work began to gain broad acceptance only in April 1984, when Margaret M. Heckler, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, announced in a news conference that “the probable cause of AIDS has been found” — not by Dr. Montagnier but by Gallo and his lab, which called the virus HTLV-3. There was a chance, Gallo noted at the time, that his virus was the same as the one isolated at Pasteur.

It soon became clear that LAV, HTLV-3 and a third virus — subsequently isolated by researcher Jay Levy — were variants of the same pathogen. Jousting over precedence and priority began almost immediately, with Gallo claiming that he had isolated the virus without relying on help from the French. He said he had gone far beyond their research by establishing the virus’s link to AIDS and detailing its structure and development.

Genetic testing showed a striking similarity between the pathogens isolated by Dr. Montagnier and Gallo. The viruses they relied on for their research appeared to be identical, or at least taken from the same source.

In fact, Dr. Montagnier had sent samples of his virus to the Gallo lab, as he had to other researchers who inquired about LAV. While Gallo insisted that his work was entirely his own, some scientists speculated that the National Cancer Institute’s cells had been contaminated by the samples from Pasteur.

The controversy led to a lawsuit over the HIV blood test, a crucial diagnostic tool that would help slow the virus’s spread — and would earn millions of dollars in royalties for whichever lab held the patent.

Pasteur applied for a U.S. patent in December 1983, a few months before Gallo’s team filed an application of their own. After the patent was awarded to the American researchers in May 1985, the Pasteur Institute sued the U.S. government, alleging that the Gallo test had been made using the French virus.

In news reports, Gallo was frequently cast as the villain to the dignified Dr. Montagnier. But neither side was above politicking, journalist David Remnick noted in a Washington Post report: Dr. Montagnier, he wrote, “publicly affected a Gallic hauteur even while he was filing lawsuits and playing scientific politics with all the skill of a Chicago alderman.”

The dispute seemed to have come to an end in 1987, after Reagan and Chirac announced an agreement in which royalties from the blood test were split between France and the United States, and the two scientists agreed to describe themselves as “co-discoverers” of HIV. (The virus’s name, coined by an international committee the previous year, was itself a compromise, designed to replace the competing names LAV and HTLV-3.)

Dr. Montagnier and Gallo publicly reconciled, and journalists and scientists speculated that a Nobel Prize was imminent. Along with Myron “Max” Essex, one of the first researchers to suggest that AIDS might be caused by a retrovirus, the two scientists shared a 1986 Lasker Award for clinical medical research.

But questions regarding the discovery of HIV resurfaced in 1989, when the Chicago Tribune published a 50,000-word article by the investigative reporter John Crewdson, who suggested that Gallo had either stolen the virus from the French or taken it inadvertently as part of a years-long pattern of shoddy research and potential scientific misconduct.

The reporting spurred investigations by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services, which examined Gallo’s lab records and interviewed scores of his colleagues as part of what The Post described as “the longest running and most heavily publicized fraud controversy in the history of American science.”

By the time it was over, both Dr. Montagnier and Gallo declared that they had been vindicated. The U.S. Office of Research Integrity found Gallo guilty of scientific misconduct before its appeals board dropped the charges in 1993. Amid the proceedings, Gallo acknowledged that his viruses had probably been contaminated by samples from Pasteur.

As a result, the U.S-France blood test agreement was tweaked in 1994, so that the French received a bigger share of royalties from the sale of test kits. “It’s the end of a bad story,” Dr. Montagnier told The Post, adding that he remained focused on his research into HIV/AIDS, which remains uncured.

In an autobiographical essay for the Nobel Prize, he recalled that he had been interested in medicine since he was a young man, when he watched as his grandfather experienced “terrible suffering” and eventually died of rectal cancer. He later found himself just as powerless in the face of AIDS, as patients with the disease waited outside his laboratory offices in Paris.

They were there, the Tribune reported, to ask if the man who had discovered the virus crippling their immune systems might also know how to defeat it. “These poor AIDS patients,” Dr. Montagnier said. “They regard me as a god.”

‘I don’t have to be ashamed’

An only child, Luc Antoine Montagnier was born in Chabris, France, on Aug. 18, 1932. He grew up near Poitiers, where his mother was a seamstress and theater usher, and his father, who suffered from chronic enterocolitis and lesions in his heart, was an accountant.

Dr. Montagnier studied science and medicine at the University of Poitiers, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1953, and completed his medical studies in Paris, where he earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1960.

He joined the Pasteur Institute in 1972 and was the founding director of the its viral oncology unit until 2000, when he became a professor emeritus. From 1974 to 1998 he was also director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research, one of Europe’s largest scientific agencies.

Dr. Montagnier was appointed the head of a proposed $30 million AIDS research center at Queens College in New York in 1997, but the research effort failed to attract sufficient financing and closed.

He married Dorothea Ackerman in 1961 and had three children, Jean-Luc, Anne-Marie and Francine. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

His death was first reported by the website FranceSoir and later confirmed by media organizations including Libération, which said that his death certificate had been filed in Neuilly.

In 1986, Dr. Montagnier and his lab announced the discovery of a second type of HIV, concentrated in patients in West Africa. He went on to establish biotechnology companies focused on developing a cure for AIDS, and in 1993 he co-founded the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, a UNESCO-
affiliated organization based in Paris.

But Dr. Montagnier drew growing criticism as he threw his weight behind unlikely theories, surprising some colleagues when he asserted that HIV causes AIDS only by combining with bacteria called mycoplasma. He later backed ideas that were widely derided as pseudoscience, appearing at an autism conference alongside actress Jenny McCarthy to declare that the developmental disorder could be cured with antibiotics.

In 2010, he accepted a professorship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to study “water memory,” claiming to have found evidence that DNA could be “teleported” through electromagnetic waves picked up by water. More recently, he claimed that the coronavirus was human-made, created as part of HIV vaccine research. He cited a paper that had not yet been peer-reviewed and has since been retracted, according to the Associated Press.

Former colleagues reacted to his assertions with anger and dismay. In response to speeches and interviews he gave condemning mandatory vaccinations for children, more than 100 academics denounced him in a 2017 statement.

Dr. Montagnier remained defiant, saying that the criticism of his peers had not stopped him before. “I don’t have to be ashamed of my career, nor of what I’m currently doing,” he told Le Monde in 2018. “The discovery of the AIDS virus saved millions of lives. I have authority, I am recognized, so that can endure.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly said when and where patent applications were filed for an HIV blood test. Luc Montagnier’s team originally applied for a patent in Britain, not the United States, before filing for a U.S. patent in December 1983. Robert C. Gallo’s team applied for a U.S. patent several months after that, not more than a year later. The article has been corrected.