Luc Montagnier

Luc Montagnier was a French virologist and co-discoverer of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, the cause of AIDS. Working at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in the early 1980s, Montagnier and his colleagues isolated the retrovirus from patients with symptoms of the emerging epidemic, work that made possible the first diagnostic tests for the disease. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV and with Harald zur Hausen, who was recognized separately for his discovery of human papillomaviruses causing cervical cancer. Montagnier spent most of his career at the Institut Pasteur and later became a full time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. In his later years he drew criticism from the scientific community for using his Nobel status to promote views outside his field of expertise, including, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lab leak claim about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 that was rejected by other virologists.