French scientist Luc Montagnie r, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine for his joint discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), died at the age of 89, as confirmed on February 10 by the mayor of the Paris suburb where he was hospitalized.
Montagnier died at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, said the mayor, Jean-Christophe Fromantin, confirming a report published by the local newspaper Francesoir.
His figure was surrounded by controversies. In fact, the scientist saw his prestige diminish in the last years of his life due to his adherence to numerous pseudoscientific currents.
He had recently adhered to the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, would have been designed by man in a laboratory and would contain some HIV-1 genes. He was also critical of COVID-19 vaccines, whose effectiveness and safety have already been tested in billions of people worldwide.
As reported by the newspaper El País, a year after winning the Nobel, the researcher had maintained (without evidence) that water could remember supposed electromagnetic waves emitted by the DNA of viruses and bacteria. Montagnier had also suggested eating fermented papaya against Parkinson’s.
The French virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, co-discoverer of HIV and Nobel winner along with Montagnier, had refused to comment on her colleague in an interview in 2017. “I am not going to talk about Montagnier. I’m not talking about him. He is free to say what he wants,” stated Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
That same year, more than a hundred French science and medicine academics rebelled against Montagnier, after he claimed that vaccines “poisoned” children. “We cannot accept that one of our colleagues uses his Nobel Prize to spread, outside the field of his competence, messages dangerous to health, disregarding the ethics that should govern science and medicine,” the professors had written in an open letter. .
