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Participation in a Corona protest in Milan 2022: In the last years of his life, the doctor Luc Montagnier was increasingly criticized
Photo: Mourad Balti Touati / imago images/ZUMA Wire
The Nobel Prize winner and French discoverer of the AIDS pathogen HIV, Luc Montagnier, is dead. The doctor died at the age of 89, according to the Ministry of Science in Paris.
Montagnier received the 2008 Nobel Prize together with his colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi.
Both had isolated the immunodeficiency virus in samples from seriously ill patients at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in the early 1980s.
The discovery also paved the way for modern AIDS drugs.
Montagnier had long argued with US virologist Robert Gallo about the discovery of HIV and patents.
However, the Nobel Committee assumed that it could be taken for granted that the discovery had been made in France.
Montagnier had applied for the patent for the first AIDS test six months before Gallo, who, however, was granted it earlier by the US patent office.
The dispute was not settled until 1994.
In recent years, Montagnier has made a name for himself with controversial theses in the scientific community that have eroded his earlier reputation.
During the corona crisis, for example, he suspected that researchers had created the virus on purpose.
In January, Montagnier also appeared as a speaker at a protest against vaccination certificates in Milan.
atb/dpa/AP