Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of the human immunodeficiency virus.
It’s complicated.
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From this sample Dr. Montagnier’s team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus.
The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS.
The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS. Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones.
When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute.
And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress.
There was a lawsuit: an out-of-court settlement was mediated by Jonas Salk.
Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. And in 2002 they appeared to have resolved their rivalry when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, not him, in awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barré-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.”)
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Last May, he added fuel to the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines by claiming, in a French video, that vaccine programs were an “unacceptable mistake” because, he said, vaccines could cause viral variants.
And in January, in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal written with the Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, he criticized President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The authors said it was “irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for the government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen.”