Luc Montagnier

Luc Montagnier was born on 18 August 1932 in France and built his career as a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. His work isolating the human immunodeficiency virus earned him the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen. He later took a full-time professorship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. By 2017, other academics were publicly criticising him for leveraging his Nobel status to promote what they called dangerous health messages outside his expertise. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he championed the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created in and escaped from a lab - a claim rejected by his virologist peers. He died on 8 February 2022.