Luc Montagnier

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Luc Montagnier bigraphy, stories - Joint recipient, 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Luc Montagnier : biography

18 August 1932 –

Luc Antoine Montagnier (born 18 August 1932) is a French virologist and joint recipient with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). A long-time researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, he currently works as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University in China.

In 2009, Montagnier published two controversial research studies that some homeopaths claimed as support for homeopathy. Although Montagnier disputed any such support, CBC Marketplace many scientists greeted his claims with scorn and harsh criticism.

History of the discovery of HIV

In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hôpital Bichat hospital in Paris, France, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS (known at the time as "Gay-related immune deficiency" or GRID). Rozenbaum had suggested at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses. Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum’s AIDS patients and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy. They named it "lymphadenopathy-associated virus," or LAV, since it was not yet clear that it was the cause of AIDS, and published their findings in the journal Science in 1983.

A team led by Robert Gallo of the United States published similar findings in the same issue of Science and later confirmed the discovery of the virus and presented evidence that it caused AIDS. Gallo called the virus "human T-lymphotropic virus type III" (HTLV-III) because of perceived similarities with HTLV-I and -II, which had previously been discovered in his lab. Because of the timing of the discoveries, whether Montagnier’s or Gallo’s group was first to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an acrimonious dispute. HIV isolates usually have a high degree of variability because the virus mutates rapidly. In comparison, the first two human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) isolates, Lai/LAV (formerly LAV, isolated at the Pasteur Institute) and Lai/IIIB (formerly HTLV-IIIB, isolated from a pooled culture at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute) were strikingly similar in sequence, suggesting that the two isolates were in fact the same, or at least shared a common source.

In November 1990, the Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health attempted to clear up the matter by commissioning a group at Roche to analyze archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. The group, led by Sheng-Yung Chang, examined archival specimens and concluded in Nature in 1993 that Gallo’s virus had come from Montagnier’s lab. Chang determined that the French group’s LAV was a virus from one patient that had contaminated a culture from another. On request, Montagnier’s group had sent a sample of this culture to Gallo, not knowing it contained two viruses. It then contaminated the pooled culture on which Gallo was working. (Open access)

Before the 1993 publication of Chang’s results, Gallo’s lab was accused and initially found guilty of "minor misconduct" by the Office of Scientific Integrity in 1991, and then by the newly created Office of Research Integrity in 1992 for the misappropriation of a sample of HIV produced at the Pasteur Institute. The subsequent publication in 1993 of Chang’s investigation cleared Gallo’s lab of the charges, but his reputation had been unfairly tainted.

Today it is agreed that Montagnier’s group first isolated HIV, but Gallo’s group is credited with discovering that the virus causes AIDS and with generating much of the science that made the discovery possible, including a technique previously developed by Gallo’s lab for growing T cells in the laboratory. When Montagnier’s group first published their discovery, they said HIV’s role in causing AIDS "remains to be determined."