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Gallo and Montagnier Discover HIV

Gallo and Montagnier Discover HIV

Robert Gallo’s initial medical research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, focused on retroviruses, mystifying organisms that present mirror images of themselves genetically. As early as 1910, such retroviruses were identified as a cause of cancer in hens. Later, scientists established a link between retroviruses and cancer in other animals.

During the 1970s, Gallo and French virologist Luc Montagnier of the Institut Pasteur were independently searching for a link between retroviruses and cancer in humans. By 1975, Gallo had isolated HL-23, a human retrovirus taken from the blood of a leukemia patient. Late in 1978, researchers at the NCI discovered an atypical T-cell cancer in the lymph node of a patient and identified it as reverse transcriptase—seemingly a retrovirus—which they cultured and grew for the next two years. Two other patients from a large patient population tested positive for the same retrovirus, which Gallo labeled the human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV).

In 1981, acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was becoming a medical reality in both the United States and France. When James Curran of the Centers for Disease Control talked about it at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) the following year, suggesting that AIDS attacks T-cells, Gallo became intrigued and involved, surmising that a link might exist between AIDS and HTLV, which also attacks T-cells. Meanwhile, because blood supplies were feared to be contaminated with the as-yet unidentified disease, Montagnier and his colleagues began testing blood plasma for HTLV.

Early in 1983, Montagnier called Gallo to share information about a retrovirus identified in a French AIDS patient. Montagnier requested that Gallo send him some antibodies of HTLV for comparison with his patient’s cells. The two initially collaborated, with Montagnier and his team sending samples to Gallo as well. After some analysis of the isolated retrovirus, Montagnier’s group determined that it did not behave the same as HTLV, and they later noted that AIDS kills, rather than transforms, host cells, as HTLV does. It was Gallo and his team that found the causal relationship between the retrovirus and AIDS.

The relationship between Gallo and Montagnier became acrimonious and competitive, however, when Gallo and American media claimed that Gallo had discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) first. Many years later, it was determined that the disease Montagnier was studying had contaminated specimens Gallo examined, and both scientists were acknowledged as codiscoverers. Despite the circumstances surrounding the isolation of HIV and the subsequent discovery of its role in AIDS, this achievement provided a vital link for discovering the means of preventing, treating, and controlling one of the most threatening human diseases.

As investigation into HIV and AIDS has progressed, the relationship between HIV and AIDS has been questioned. Some researchers consider evidence for HIV causing AIDS specious, arguing that it is impossible to distinguish between HIV and other causes that may trigger AIDS. Most, however, conclude that HIV infection is an absolute concomitant for the development of AIDS. Although debate over such salient details continues and a cure for AIDS has yet to be found, the discovery of HIV has had an indisputably significant impact on subsequent HIV/AIDS research.


Great Lives from History: Scientists and Science

Luc Montagnier

by Jack Ewing

French virologist

French biologist and virologist Luc Montagnier began studying cancer-causing viruses in the late 1950s. His research in the 1980s led to the isolation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which was later determined to be the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Born: August 18, 1932; Chabris, France

Also known as: Luc Antoine Montagnier; Jean-Luc Antoine Montagnier

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Virology; biochemistry; molecular biology; microbiology

Early Life

Jean-Luc Antoine Montagnier was an only child, born into a Catholic family in a small agrarian town in the Loire valley of France. His father, Antoine, was an accountant, and his mother, Marianne, was a homemaker. When he was an infant, the Montagnier family moved for a time to Poitiers, then relocated to the community of Châtellerault just north of Poitiers.

At age five, Montagnier was severely injured when an automobile ran him down as he was crossing a road. He spent two days in a coma, and although he was badly scarred from the accident, he recovered fully and was able to attend school. Montagnier was about eight years old when the German army invaded France at the start of World War II. He and his family suffered terrible privation during the war because food supplies were scarce. In 1944, their home was damaged in an Allied bombing raid on a nearby railway.

After the war, Montagnier entered secondary school at the Collège de Châtellerault, where he proved to be an excellent student. In his teens, he became interested in science and built a chemistry laboratory in the basement of his new house to perform experiments. When his paternal grandfather succumbed after a protracted battle with cancer, Montagnier became determined to study medicine and find a cure for the disease.

Following graduation from secondary school, Montagnier entered the University of Poitiers, where he earned an undergraduate degree in natural science in 1953. He subsequently attended the University of Paris, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in science in 1955.

Life’s Work

In 1955, Luc Montagnier began teaching physiology at the Faculty of Sciences at Sorbonne University in Paris while conducting research and taking courses to earn his medical degree. After obtaining his medical degree in 1960, he married Dorothea Ackerman the following year; the couple would produce two daughters and a son.

Between 1960 and 1963, Montagnier concentrated on virology while a postdoctoral fellow at the Medical Research Council at Carshalton, near London, England. There, he studied single- and double-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) viruses and retroviruses—such as those that cause influenza, hepatitis C, and polio—and was first to discover that RNA could replicate like genetic information–carrying deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

To further his knowledge particularly of cancer-causing viruses, Montagnier moved to the newly created Institute of Virology in Glasgow, Scotland, where he worked as teacher and researcher from 1963 to 1964.

In 1965, Montagnier returned to France and continued his studies of viruses at the Institut Curie in Paris, a private, nonprofit foundation that is considered one of the foremost medical, biological, and biophysical research centers in the world. Montagnier’s work, supported with funding from the US National Institutes of Health, concentrated on chromosomal cell DNA aimed at the molecular biology of animal retroviruses in hopes of detecting similarities to human viruses.

In 1972, Montagnier became head of an oncology research team at the new Department of Virology at the Institut Pasteur, a Paris-based private, nonprofit biomedical foundation established to find cures for infectious diseases. Much of the research unit’s work involved analyzing blood samples and biopsy specimens from local hospitals in search of retroviruses in human cancers.

In the early 1980s, Montagnier and his colleagues became involved in researching a virulent and deadly new disease that would become known as AIDS. Drawing upon related research from other institutions engaged in tackling the new disease and using electron microscopes for close observation, Montagnier and his c olleagues analyzed a lymph node biopsy from a stricken patient and were able to isolate the virus. They determined that, though the symptoms were similar, the virus was very different from the suspected human T-cell lymphotropic virus (HTLV) that causes leukemia; instead, it was a type of retrovirus that afflicted animals without immunodeficiency.

Montagnier continued his studies into the cause of AIDS after moving in 1985 to the French national institute of health and medical research (known as Inserm) as a professor of virology. That research ultimately culminated in the 1983 discovery and isolation of HIV, a key factor in the cause of AIDS. Montagnier and his colleagues published the results of their findings in a series of books, beginning with SIDA et Infection par VIH (AIDS and HIV infection, 1989), AIDS Facts and Hopes (1991), New Concepts in AIDS Pathogenesis (1993), and Des virus et des hommes (Viruses and men, 1994).

After more than a decade at Inserm, Montagnier moved to the United States in 1997 for a four-year stint as professor of molecular and cellular biology at Queens College, Community University of New York, in New York City.

Returning to France in the early twenty-first century, Montagnier continued and extended his research into viruses. In 2008, based on his discovery of HIV, Montagnier shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with colleague Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and German scientist Harald zur Hansen, who was conducting similar but unrelated research into the causes of cancer. Soon after, he used part of his prize money to establish the Luc Montagnier Foundation, a nonprofit institutionheadquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, that focuses on research into the infectious and nutritional factors behind cancer, diabetes, and other epidemic diseases.

In 2010, Montagnier accepted a new opportunity as professor of virology and head of research at the Montagnier Institute at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Impact

Montagnier has been widely recognized for his many accomplishments in the field of virology, particularly for his research that advanced the understanding of HIV and greatly assisted in the fight against AIDS. In addition to the crowning achievement of the 2008 Nobel Prize, he has also been honored internationally with France’s Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale Prix Raymond Rosen (1971), the United States’ Albert Lasker Clinical Research Award (1986), Canada’s Gairdner International Award (1987), the Japan Prize for Preventative Medicine (1988), and Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal International Prize for Medicine (1993), among others. Montagnier is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and an officer of the Legion of Honor.

Despite such acclaim, Montagnier has been a figure of controversy during the latter half of his career. In the mid-1980s, even as he and his research team were isolating HIV in France, other investigators—notably US researcher Robert C. Gallo—were also examining the same retroviruses and came to the same conclusions regarding HIV. The competition between the French and American governments over who truly deserved credit for the discovery of HIV led to a protracted feud laced with accusations of misconduct that was only resolved in 1993 following a US Office of Research Integrity investigation. As a result, Montagnier and Gallo were proclaimed codiscoverers of HIV.

In 2009, Montagnier startled the scientific community with the publication of several papers based on research suggesting that when the DNA of viruses is immersed in water, it emits low-frequency radio waves. Even when the DNA is diluted to the point of insignificance, Montagnier claimed, the water continues to emit signals that scientists could use to detect the former presence of disease. The research—which initially aimed at finding the cause of autism and appeared to support homeopathy—has been widely dismissed as pseudoscientific and perhaps even unethical, based on unsupported hypotheses, badly designed experimental protocol, and a small sample size of test subjects.

Further Reading

1 

Harden, Victoria A. AIDS at 30: A History. Dulles: Potomac, 2012. Print. Studies the development of HIV and AIDS, from its first appearance in 1981 onward, with a focus on scientific research into the causes of the disease and the various therapeutic treatments devised to combat it.

2 

Shilts, Randy. And the Band Played on: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Rev. ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 2007. Print. Issued on the twentieth anniversary of Shilts’s groundbreaking investigation into the early years of the killer disease, with an emphasis on initial medical efforts to combat AIDS, the political response, and the underlying social consequences of the disease.

3 

Weeks, Benjamin S., and I. Edward Alcamo. AIDS: The Biological Basis. 5th ed. Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett, 2011. Print. An illustrated textbook covering a history of HIV-AIDS, basics of epidemiology and immunopathy, global distribution patterns, testing and drugs used to detect and combat the disease, and more. Includes outlines, glossaries, and study questions.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Ewing, Jack. "Luc Montagnier." Great Lives from History: Scientists and Science, edited by Joseph L. Spradley, Salem Press, 2012. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLSS_0244.
APA 7th
Ewing, J. (2012). Luc Montagnier. In J. L. Spradley (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Scientists and Science. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Ewing, Jack. "Luc Montagnier." Edited by Joseph L. Spradley. Great Lives from History: Scientists and Science. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2012. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.