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.
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 his last years, Montagnier made a name for himself with controversial theses in the scientific community that eroded his earlier reputation. During the Corona crisis, for example, he suspected that researchers had created the virus on purpose.
Source: Nachrichten
