French Nobel laureate discovered HIV, drifted away from science, and ended up as an antivaxer

‘From the light to the shadow’, that’s how journalists from the French newspaper described Le Monde four years ago the decline of the acclaimed virologist. They were looking for him, at home in Neuilly sur Seine, near Paris, but had to promise in advance via email that they were not lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry. He had become a completely different person, they noticed. Luc Montagnier, the erudite and articulate Nobel laureate, had turned into an angry, suspicious man, taunted by his colleagues for his unscientific views.

Montagnier, who died last Tuesday at the age of 89, has made one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century: the discovery of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In May 1983 he wrote together with his right-hand man Françoise Barré-Sinoussi in trade magazine science that they had managed to isolate an unknown virus from the lymph node of a young AIDS patient. The world had been in the grip of a mysterious, deadly disease for two years by then, mainly among gay men. There was no diagnosis, no test, let alone a cure. The discovery of the virologists at the Institut Pasteur in Paris would lead to the development of a blood test and the arrival of virus inhibitors.

lab in garage

Montagnier got the inspiration for his career in the makeshift chemical lab in the garage of his father, an accountant in a small French village. He wanted, he once said in an interview, ‘explaining the world through science’. That mission brought him fame, but also considerable controversy. Initially through no fault of his own.

A year after the French publication, the American biomedical researcher Robert Gallo came up with the claim that he had really discovered the virus that causes AIDS. That scientific dispute even led to a legal battle over the royalties of HIV testing.

Until Gallo had to admit that the virus he claimed as his own discovery had simply been sent to him by colleague Montagnier’s lab. In 1994 the loot was divided and the American and French presidents signed an agreement dividing the revenue from the patent on HIV testing. The two top scientists came up with a joint statement in 2002: Montagnier had discovered HIV, but Gallo had revealed that the virus causes AIDS.

Professor and HIV researcher Peter Reiss remembers meeting the two scientists at a small conference where he was allowed to give a lecture as a young researcher. Then he sat down with them at lunch. “I don’t remember what we talked about, but one thing has stayed with me: what vain men.”

The dissension flared up briefly when Gallo was skipped in 2008 and the Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to the French couple Montagnier and Barré-Sinoussi. When Reiss was invited by President Obama during the 2012 international AIDS conference with a group of researchers, he took a photo of Gallo in the White House, talking with Barré-Sinoussi. “When I showed her the photo later, she said, ‘What do you think it was about? Again about the Nobel Prize and how wrong it was that he had not been awarded it.’

Controversial Statements

Montagnier’s career took a strange turn as he slowly drifted away from science, making statements that completely lost sight of the basics of his field. From that moment on, the commotion arose through its own hands. The year after the Nobel Prize, he proclaimed that patients with a strong immune system can get rid of HIV within weeks and that the right diet can prevent HIV infection.

He claimed that water has a memory and that DNA can emit electromagnetic radiation. In 2012, he caused a stir among scientists by suggesting at a conference that antibiotics could be successful against autism. Five years later, he turned against compulsory childhood vaccinations, because they are said to be responsible for SIDS. It occurred to him a public indictment of more than a hundred academic doctors. “We cannot accept that one of our colleagues uses his Nobel Prize to spread messages that are dangerous to public health outside his field of expertise,” they wrote.

Last year, he claimed that the coronavirus had been pieced together in a lab and called the corona vaccines an “unacceptable mistake” because they would cause new variants of the virus.

Contribution to science remains intact

‘What inspired him is a mystery to me,’ says microbiologist Roel Coutinho, a pioneer in the field of HIV research and control. Coutinho got to know Montagnier in 1992 when the international AIDS congress was being organized in Amsterdam, and already noticed that the Frenchman had a penchant for a controversial HIV theory that was doing the rounds at the time. ‘It is difficult to understand that he, as a top scientist, was going to proclaim such wonderful ideas. And also harmful. As a Nobel laureate, he had a lot of authority.’

Reiss: ‘If you’ve done solid experimental work, like he did, you know how science works, that you formulate a hypothesis and have to test it. How could he have derailed like that?’

Which side of the virologist is remembered? The Institut Pasteur, long home of Montagnier, wrote after his death that while the professor had expressed quite a few unscientific ideas in the last years of his life, his career marked the history of French scientific research. ‘He was always controversial,’ said US HIV and AIDS expert Donald Francis in The New York Times, ‘but I had great respect for his research team.’ His enormous contribution to science remains intact, says Coutinho: ‘He deserves that honor.’