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Journalism of Courage
Nobel-winning virologist Luc Montagnier, who died in Paris Tuesday, was a brilliant and controversial figure who often challenged the core principles of science and scientific discourse.
The 89-year-old won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008 for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. The Frenchman shared the award with fellow researcher Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. The duo had shared half of the Nobel with German scientist Harald zur Hausen for his discovery of human papilloma viruses that cause cervical cancer.
Early life
Montagnier was born on August 8, 1932, in central France. After completing school, Montagnier went on to earn degrees in science and medicine and earned a PhD in virology from the University of Paris. He joined the Institut Pasteur in France as a professor and headed their Viral Oncology Unit for over two decades until 2000. It was at the Pasteur Institute that Montagnier undertook the crucial research that earned him the Nobel.
In 1993, Montagnier co-founded the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, before heading off to the US to work at the Queens College in New York. He has been awarded several medals, including the prestigious Légion d’Honneur, the Lasker Award and the Gairdner Award.
The Nobel-winning discovery
Interestingly, the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus is also a tale of US-French diplomacy.
In 1983, Montagnier was roped in by Dr Willy Rozenbaum, a Parisien doctor, to look into a lymph node of an AIDs-infected man. The acquired immune deficiency syndrome was a mystery at this point, and the scientists were in the dark about its cause, methods of diagnosis and treatment. Montagnier and fellow scientist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi isolated the retrovirus from this sample and named it LAV (lymphadenopathy associated virus). Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier published their findings, but they could not prove that LAV caused AIDS.
A year later, US scientist Dr Robert Gallo published a series of articles confirming the link between a retrovirus (which he named HTLV-III) and AIDS. This led to confusion over whether HTLV-III and LAV are the same, leading to a public fallout between the researchers. The issue was solved years later in a meeting between then US President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac.
Though Dr Gallo is widely credited with putting together the connection between HIV and AIDS, the Nobel Committee attributed the discovery to Barré-Sinoussi and Montagnier alone.
Describing the achievement, the Nobel committee said that researchers isolated and cultured lymph node cells from patients that had swollen lymph nodes characteristic of the early stage of acquired immune deficiency. The duo then detected activity of the retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase, a direct sign of retrovirus replication.
“They characterised this retrovirus as the first known human lentivirus based on its morphological, biochemical and immunological properties. HIV impaired the immune system because of massive virus replication and cell damage to lymphocytes. The discovery was one prerequisite for the current understanding of the biology of the disease and its antiretroviral treatment,” it said. Their discovery allowed for the rapid diagnosis of affected patients, and helped curb the spread of the AIDS pandemic, the committee noted.
Covid controversy
Towards the end of his career, Montagnier found himself caught up in several controversies over his work in what many in the field termed pseudoscience. In a 2010 interview in the Science magazine titled “French Nobelist escapes ‘intellectual terror’ to pursue radical ideas in China”, Montagnier, then 78 years old, spoke of his plans to study the emission of electromagnetic waves from DNA in Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. The article said that Montagnier’s claims have been interpreted by many as evidence for homoeopathy.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Montagnier again courted controversy by arguing that the virus was human-made. In a paper published in August 2020, he wrote that “everything converges towards possible laboratory manipulations,” a claim which has been rejected as unsubstantiated by several members of the scientific community. He also said that widespread vaccination is an enormous error, as stronger variants will emerge in vaccinated individuals due to antibody-dependent enhancement. These comments have been co-opted by vaccine sceptics in France and around the world.
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