Luc Montagnier, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2008, has passed away on Tuesday. A veteran scientist and a controversial figure till his last breath, he passed away at the age of 89.
Dr. Montagnier received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), which is infamous for causing Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), one of the most feared infectious diseases that mankind has to tackle.
He had shared his half of the Noble with a French researcher named Françoise Barré-Sinoussi. They both had shared the rest of the Nobel with a German scientist named Harald zur Hausen, who discovered Human Papilloma Virus known for causing cervical cancer.
In 1983, Montagnier was called by another doctor to take a look at the lymph nodes of a person infected with AIDS. AIDS as a disease was still a grey area at that point in time.
Dr. Montagnier, who isolated the virus from the lymph nodes of the infected person along with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, gave the name LAV (lymphadenopathy-associated virus) to the virus.
But due to so little knowledge about AIDS, no link could be established between LAV and AIDS.
About a year later, a US scientist named Dr. Robert Gallo established a link between AIDS and a virus that he named HTLV-III. This naturally led to tensions and fallouts between Dr. Gallo and Dr. Montagnier as there was widespread confusion on whether HTLV-III and LAV were the same viruses.
Finally, the Nobel Committee credited Dr. Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV.
The life of Dr. Montagnier was filled with controversies until the end. When the Covid pandemic began, he was very vocal in saying that Covid-19 was a laboratory-made virus. This claim was countered by a lot of other experts.
He was also against mass vaccinations as he believed that mass vaccinations would ultimately lead to the emergence of a much stronger variant of Covid-19 in the vaccinated people.
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