From Nobel to the fight against vaccines
How Luc Montagnier discovered HIV and surprised the scientific world
Oleg Sokolenko, Forbes
On February 10, it became known about the death of 89-year-old French scientist Luc Montagnier. In 1983, he discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), and in 2008 he received the Nobel Prize for it. However, in the last years of his life, his new theories caused criticism and rejection from the scientific community. Forbes Life tells about the life of a scientist
Born twice
Luc Montagnier was born in August 1932 in the city of Chabry in central France, in the family of an accountant and a housewife. Most of all, he remembered two events from his childhood. The first happened when he was five: the boy was hit by a car, he lay in a coma for two days, after which, in his own words, "experienced a rebirth." Another strong impression was the war. Four years of the German occupation were remembered by Luke with constant hunger: a chubby boy by nature, he was chronically malnourished. In June 1944, during the liberation of Chabry by Allied forces, the house of the Montagnier family was destroyed. And the sight of so many dead bodies and emaciated prisoners of concentration camps inspired Luke with an aversion to war for the rest of his life.
In high school, he became interested in science and equipped a chemical laboratory in the basement of a new house, in which he synthesized various chemical compounds. In 1947, Luke's grandfather died of intestinal cancer. The sight of his torment "affected me so much that it was probably for this reason that I later decided to study medicine, and specifically cancer," Montagnier wrote many years later in his autobiography for the Nobel Prize website.
In 1953, Luc received the equivalent of a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Poitiers, and two years later graduated with a master's degree from the University of Paris. In 1960, the young scientist defended his dissertation at the Sorbonne on the material of his studies of human embryo heart cells, and left for three and a half years for an internship in England, in the laboratory of the famous virologist Kingsley Sanders.
At Sanders, a young scientist made his first significant discovery. It concerned RNA viruses, in which the hereditary material is stored in the form not of DNA, as in all other living beings, but of another ribonucleic acid - RNA. Montagnier was able to show for the first time that RNA is also capable of doubling itself. Some viruses, called retroviruses, use this mechanism to synthesize DNA based on their RNA, and embed it into the DNA of a host — for example, a human. This modification of DNA causes the cell to divide rapidly, a cancerous tumor occurs.
Controversial discovery
The study of oncogenic retroviruses has become the main topic of Montagnier's research. In 1972, he founded and headed the laboratory of Viral Oncology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In particular, the laboratory studied interferons — proteins that are formed in the cells of higher animals in response to the invasion of the virus and suppress its reproduction. Montagnier and colleagues were able to isolate the genes responsible for the synthesis of these proteins.
In January 1983, a piece of the lymph node of a 33-year-old man with AIDS was sent to the laboratory. At that time, this disease had just begun to be studied, its causative agent was unknown, but it was suspected that it was some kind of retrovirus. Dr. Montagnier was already a world-renowned retrovirus specialist, so the patient's attending physician wanted him to study the sample. And indeed, the team led by Luc and his student Francoise Barre-Sinussi managed to isolate a new virus from the sample, which they designated as LAV — "a virus associated with lymphadenopathy" (the last word means an increase in lymph nodes, which is observed, including AIDS).
Montagnier and Barre-Sinussi published an article about their discovery in the journal Science on May 20, 1983. And the following year, the same journal published an article by Dr. Robert Gallo and his colleagues from the US National Institutes of Health, who independently of their French colleagues discovered the same virus and named it H.T.L.V.-III. The authors of this article insisted that they made the discovery first. At the same time, it turned out that both research teams used samples from the body of the same French patient, and the Pasteur Institute suspected American colleagues of stealing their material. When they tried to get a patent for their discovery in the USA, the French sued them.
In 1987, US President Ronald Reagan and French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac were forced to personally intervene in a protracted litigation. Under their joint pressure, Montagnier and Gallo shared the patent rights to the discovery with each other. The virus had already received its modern name by that time — HIV, or, in Russian, HIV, that is, "human immunodeficiency virus".
Shared Rewards
In 1986, Montagnier received, together with Gallo, the prestigious Albert Lasker International Prize for Clinical Medical Research (now it bears the name of American cardiac surgeon Michael Debakey, who operated on Russian President Boris Yeltsin, among others). The jury of the award made a Solomonic decision: Montagnier was awarded for the discovery of the virus, Gallo — for proving his role as the causative agent of AIDS. In 2002, two scientists publicly stated that they had put their differences in the past and were going to work together to create a vaccine against this deadly disease.
However, in 2008, only Montagnier and Barre-Sinoussi decided to give the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for the discovery of HIV. The third winner in the nomination that year was the German virologist Harald zur Hausen, who showed that cervical cancer causes the human papillomavirus (HPV). Gallo was left out, but he found the courage to say that all three winners fully deserved their prizes, and he is glad that the Nobel Committee noted the importance of HIV research/AIDS.
As for Montagnier, his Nobel speech provoked criticism in the scientific world. "HIV is the main cause of the development of AIDS, but other factors can strengthen this process," he said. The French scientist attributed other infections to such factors, including possibly bacterial ones, as well as weakened immunity. Most virologists found these statements questionable.
The scandalous Nobel Laureate
The further evolution of Montagnier's scientific views shocked his colleagues even more. He became interested in theories that other serious scientists unanimously recognize as pseudoscientific. In particular, he claimed that autism is caused by water "memorizing" electromagnetic radiation, which supposedly emits bacterial DNA. On this basis, the French Nobel laureate proposed to treat autism with antibiotics. Scientific journals refused to publish articles about it, so Montagnier had to found his own.
But the matter was not limited to articles. In 2012, our hero took part in the international congress of opponents of vaccination. After that, 35 other Nobel laureates issued a joint statement demanding that Montagnier be removed from the leadership of the AIDS Research Center in Cameroon, which he then headed. And two years later, he organized a conference of homeopaths, adherents of the "memory of water" and other anti-scientific theories right in the UNESCO building, which resolutely disavowed the event.
The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic also did not leave Montagnier indifferent. In May 2021, he recorded a video in which he called mass vaccination against COVID-19 an "unacceptable mistake" — they say, it only provokes the emergence of new viral strains (most other reputable virologists do not think so). And in January, a column for The Wall Street Journal was published, written by Montagnier together with a law professor from Yale University. The co-authors criticized President Biden's idea of mandatory vaccination of employees of American enterprises, calling it "irrational, legally untenable and contrary to public interests." These and other statements of Montagnier were eagerly picked up and replicated by anti-vaccinators.
Although in the last years of his life Montagnier created an extremely ambiguous reputation in the scientific world, colleagues, nevertheless, remember his merits, and received the news of his death with sorrow. "He has always been a controversial figure, but I have great respect for the team he has assembled," he quotes The New York Times the words of the American virologist Donald Francis, who collaborated with the Montagnier laboratory in the years when HIV was discovered there.
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