paris —
French researcher Luc Montagnier, who won a Nobel Prize in 2008 for discovering HIV and more recently spread false claims about the coronavirus, has died at age 89, local government officials in France said.
Montagnier died Tuesday at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a western suburb of the capital, the area's city hall said. No other details were released.
Montagnier, a virologist, led the team that in 1983 identified the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, leading him to share the 2008 Nobel Prize in medicine with colleague Francoise Barré-Sinoussi.
The French minister for higher education and research, Frédérique Vidal, praised Montagnier’s work on HIV in a written statement Thursday and expressed her condolences to his family.
Inspired by discoveries
Montagnier was born in 1932 in the village of Chabris in central France.
According to his autobiography on the Nobel Prize website, Montagnier studied medicine in Poitiers and Paris. He said recent scientific discoveries in 1957 inspired him to become a virologist in the rapidly advancing field of molecular biology.
He joined the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1960 and became head of the Pasteur Institute’s virology department in 1972.
“My involvement in AIDS began in 1982, when the information circulated that a transmissible agent — possibly a virus — could be at the origin of this new, mysterious disease,” Montagnier said in his autobiography.
In 1983, a...
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