Luc Montagnier

About Luc Montagnier

Luc Montagnier (born 1932 in Chabris, France) is a French virologist and joint recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In 1982 he was asked for assistance with establishing the possible underlying retroviral cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS, by Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hôpital Bichat hospital in Paris. Rozenbaum's role was vital, as he had been openly speculating at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus, and it was from a lymph node biopsy taken from one of Rozenbaum's patients that the breakthrough was to come. Jean-Claude Chermann played a vital role in the discovery as well.

By 1983, this group of scientists and doctors, headed by Montagnier, had discovered the causative virus (Barré-Sinoussi et al., 1983). It was named lymphadenopathy-associated virus, or LAV. A year later, a team led by Robert Gallo of the United States confirmed the discovery of the virus, but renamed it human T-lymphotropic virus type III (HTLV-III) (Popovic et al., 1984).

Montagnier's research was conducted at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Whether his or Gallo's group was first to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an acrimonious dispute. The controversy arose, in part, from the striking similarity between 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, reported to be isolated from a pooled culture at the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute), and the high degree of variability found among subsequent HIV-1 isolates. The controversy included accusations that Gallo improperly used a sample of HIV produced at the Institut Pasteur.