Luc Montagnier

Luc Montagnier (1932-2022) was a French virologist whose work at the Pasteur Institute identified the virus that causes AIDS, one of the defining medical discoveries of the late twentieth century. In 1983, working with Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann amid an unexplained epidemic of severe immune failure in young patients, Montagnier's team isolated a previously unknown retrovirus from a patient's lymph node, initially named LAV and later confirmed as HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. The discovery let clinicians develop the first blood tests to detect the virus, letting medicine screen blood supplies and diagnose patients years before effective treatment existed. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Barre-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen, and continued directing AIDS research, including at the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, for decades afterward.