Luc Montagnier

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Prof. Luc Montagnier, 1995

Luc Montagnier (born 1932 in Chabris, France) is a French virologist. 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's role was too vital.

By 1983, this group of scientists and doctors, led by this time and administrativement by Montagnier, discovered the causative virus (Barré-Sinoussi et al., 1983). They gave it the name 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. The identity of the first group to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an acrimonious dispute between the French, represented by Dr. Montagnier, and American Robert Gallo. This is because 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) provoked considerable controversy in light of the high level of variability found among subsequent HIV-1 isolates. Since then, there have been considerable and often acrimonious controversy over the priority for the discovery of HIV, including accusations that Gallo improperly used a sample of HIV produced at the Institut Pasteur.

In November 1990, the Office of Scientific Integrity at the National Institutes of Health commissioned a group at Roche to analyse archival samples established at the Pasteur Institute and the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology (LTCB) of the National Cancer Institute between 1983 and 1985. They concluded that the origin of the HIV-1 Lai/IIIB isolate discovered by Robert Gallo was the same as that discovered by Montagnier. The two scientists continued to dispute each other's claims until 1987, and it was not until President Mitterrand of France and President Reagan of the USA met that the major issues were ironed out. The scientific protagonists finally agreed to share credit for the discovery of HIV, and in 1986, both the French and the US names (LAV and HTLV-III) were dropped in favour of the new term human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (Coffin, 1986).

Luc Montagnier is the co-founder of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention and co-directs the Program for International Viral Collaboration. He has received more than 20 major awards, including the Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur, the Lasker Award (1986), and the Gairdner Award (1987).