The Nobel Prize-winning virologist who co-discovered HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has died.
Luc Montagnier died at the age of 89 on Tuesday in a hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, according to the Washington Post.
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Montagnier was born in France in 1932. He studied science and medicine, and while working as a senior researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983, Montagnier discovered HIV for the first time in his lab. Montagnier and several others had been examining the swollen lymph nodes of a fashion designer when they came across the virus that was later determined to cause AIDS.
Montagnier clashed with Robert C. Gallo, a researcher from the National Cancer Institute, for credit in discovering HIV, and millions of dollars in royalties were at stake in a lawsuit over an HIV blood test. The dispute ended in 1987, when President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France signed an agreement to split the royalties and dub the scientists “co-discoverers” of HIV.
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The Nobel Prize committee awarded Montagnier and his colleague Francoise Barre-Sinoussi the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008, stating that “never before has science and medicine been so quick to discover, identify the origin and provide treatment for a new disease entity.”
