Dr Luc Montagnier
- Born
- 18 August 1932
Dr Luc Montagnier is a French virologist and Nobel laureate who most notably in 1983 discovered the HIV virus that is responsible for AIDS.
Luc Montagnier was born in 1932 in a village in France and made it through the Second World War as a young boy. In the years following it, he was often ahead of his classmates in school, setting up a small chemistry lab in the cellar of their new house to further his scientific curiosity. Finding the libraries in his town rather limiting, he moved to Paris to finish his medical studies, there exploring virology, neurophysiology and oncology (the study of cancer).
At the age of 23 Montagnier was hired as an assistant at the Paris Sorbonne University, and in 1957 he came across work on infectious viruses that solidified his determination to become a virologist 'using the modern approach of molecular biology'. He started research on the foot and mouth disease and soon showed that RNA, a carrier of genetic information in viruses similar to DNA, could replicate in the same manner as DNA.
Montagnier started researching oncoviruses, viruses that can cause cancer, working at the Curie Institute in Paris and later creating his research unit in the Pasteur Institute. However, mystery still remained as to how the viruses could induce cancer. Scientists working in parallel to Montagnier discovered retroviruses – viruses that can alter the genetic code of the cells they infect. In cases of oncoviruses, they mutate the genetic code to cause cells to become cancerous.
In 1981 a rare illness started to be reported in Los Angeles, Unites States. Five men had been infected and two of them had died from it. Reports of the illness described symptoms of severe fatigue, fever, weight loss and seemingly only affecting gay men. A year later, the disease got its name – Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS).
Reports of the illness spread to Europe at the same time as Dr Robert Gallo in the United States discovered the first case of a retrovirus in humans. The race was now on among virologists to investigate if a similar retrovirus was responsible for AIDS. Montagnier was approached by a fellow virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi on this matter and presented with a patient who had AIDS.
They noticed swollen lymph nodes in the patient from which they took biopsies (samples of tissue). In 1983 Montagnier analysed the biopsied lymph nodes in a lab and found that there was indeed a retrovirus that was spreading through the infected node cells. The virus was named lymphadenopathy associated virus (LAV) – later renamed the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to better reflect its nature. In 2008 Montagnier was awarded the Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Barré-Sinoussi for their discovery.
Since 1983, there have been many new advances in science because of Montagnier's and Barré-Sinoussi's discovery of HIV. Almost immediately a diagnostic test was developed meaning that blood transmission could be prevented and infected individuals identified for treatment. There's now also understanding of how to prevent mother-to-child transmission and antiretroviral therapies have been developed to supress and stop the progression of HIV.