Luc Montagnier, a French virologist who won the Nobel Prize for codiscovering human immunodeficiency virus, died Tuesday (February 8) at the age of 89.
FranceSoir reports that he died “surrounded by his children,” at a hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris.
For decades, Montagnier received widespread acclaim for his work on the virus that causes AIDS. In recent years, however, he had alienated many of his colleagues by promoting fringe scientific theories and what they called “pseudoscience,” reports The Washington Post. Most recently, he had become a fierce opponent of coronavirus vaccines, and, in 2020, stirred controversy by promoting the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab, according to the Associated Press.
Montagnier was the director of the Viral Oncology Unit at the Pasteur Institute in the 1980s, as the AIDS epidemic was raging in France. At the time, AIDS had no known causes or effective treatments and ...
