Obituary
using a soft agar culture medium. He then returned to France
Massimo Di Nonno/Getty Images
Luc Antoine Montagnier
Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer
of HIV. He was born in Chabris, France,
on March 18, 1932 and died in Paris, France,
on Feb 8, 2022 aged 89 years.
The discovery of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and the
invention of diagnostic tests and treatments, were among
the triumphs of late 20th-century medical research. Less
appealing was the flurry of legal and financial disputes
precipitated by scientific disagreements over who should be
credited with identifying the infectious agent responsible.
Luc Montagnier, a founder and former Director of the Viral
Oncology Unit at Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, was one
of the two scientists at the heart of the feud. The other was
the US virologist Robert Gallo. An agreement between them
did eventually emerge. But while Montagnier and his Institut
Pasteur colleague, the virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi,
were awarded a share of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine “for their discovery of human immunodeficiency
virus”, Gallo was not. Montagnier, in the latter part of his
life—and despite his Nobel Prize—adopted increasingly
unorthodox ideas that alienated him from colleagues and
from the scientific establishment.
Montagnier had become interested in science while a
teenager. After a science degree from the University of
Poitiers, France, he moved to Paris as an assistant in the
Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne and did a PhD. In
1960, having decided to become a virologist, he moved
to Carshalton in the UK as a postdoctoral fellow at the now
defunct Virus Research Unit of the Medical Research Council.
In 1963 he transferred to the then Institute of Virology in
Glasgow, UK, where he devised a way of growing viruses
1862
and between 1965 and 1972 he was Laboratory Chief at the
Institut Curie before moving to the Institut Pasteur. “At first
he was working on the effects of interferon on viruses”, says
Simon Wain-Hobson, an ex-colleague and now Emeritus
Professor of Molecular Retrovirology at the Institut Pasteur.
He describes the work as “solid” rather than eye-catching.
This changed in 1983 when Montagnier, by now studying
retroviruses, was given tissue from the lymph node of a
man with AIDS. It was natural that Montagnier should be
approached, says Wain-Hobson. “His was one of the few
groups in Paris working on retroviruses.”
With Barré-Sinoussi’s virus-growing skills, Montagnier
identified what he dubbed lymphadenopathy associated
virus, and they published the findings. “Like many virologists
I was not very impressed when their paper first appeared”,
recalls Robin Weiss, Emeritus Professor of Viral Oncology at
University College London, UK. Their electron micrographs did
not resemble the tumour viruses that Weiss was accustomed
to seeing. “I became more impressed when I met Montagnier
at a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meeting on retroviruses
in 1983…He showed me some new electron micrographs…
and these really impressed.” The meeting had been organised
by Gallo, Co-founder and Director of the Institute of Human
Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in
Baltimore, MD, USA, who had a candidate virus of his own.
A dispute emerged, became personal, and was soon being
reported in the media. “Luck is hugely important in science”,
says Wain-Hobson. “Montagnier was in the right place at the
right time.” And he had the knowledge and skills required to
grow the virus. Weiss agrees: “He knew how to move when
something fell into his lap.” In 1986, Gallo and Montagnier
shared a Lasker Award, given with carefully worded citations:
to Gallo “for his unique contributions in identifying the cause
of AIDS”; to Montagnier “for his discovery of a retrovirus
shown to be responsible for this major new threat”.
Weiss describes Montagnier as “a rather reserved, rather
private person…outwardly cordial, but difficult to get to
know”. Like others in science he is puzzled by Montagnier’s
adoption of pseudoscientific ideas. Some commentators
have attributed it to the consequence of Nobel Prize
winners finding themselves questioned on matters of
which they have no special knowledge. Wain-Hobson
offers a more sympathetic suggestion: that Montagnier’s
behaviour was partly a result of bruising disputes that he
was ill-equipped to deal with, and that had perhaps knocked
him off balance intellectually. “I think maybe he started out
just wanting to help people who had unorthodox ideas,
wanting to give them a chance”, says Wain-Hobson. But
what really motivated Montagnier in the unorthodox views
he adopted is uncertain. He leaves a wife, Dorothea, and
children Jean-Luc, Anne-Marie, and Francine.
Geoff Watts
www.thelancet.com Vol 399 May 14, 2022