Luc Montagnier (; , ; 18 August 1932 – 8 February 2022) was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the conspiracy theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory. Such a claim has been rejected by other virologists. He has been criticised by other academics for using his Nobel prize status to "spread dangerous health messages outside his field of knowledge". Early life and education Montagnier was born in Chabris. Montagnier became interested in science as a teenager. He studied science at the University of Poitiers, France, and then became an assistant in the Faculty of Sciences at Sorbonne University, where he obtained a PhD. Career In 1960 Montagnier moved to Carshalton, UK as a postdoctoral fellow at the now defunct Virus Research Unit of the Medical Research Council (United Kingdom). In 1963, he moved to the then Institute of Virology in Glasgow. He developed a soft agar culture medium to culture viruses. From 1965 until 1972 he was Laboratory Chief at the Institut Curie, then moved to the Institut Pasteur working on the effects of interferon on viruses. Discovery of HIV In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hôpital Bichat hospital in Paris, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS (known at the time as "gay-related immune deficiency" or GRID). Rozenbaum had suggested at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses. Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum's AIDS patients and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy. They named it "lymphadenopathy-associated virus", or LAV, since it was not then clear that it was the cause of AIDS, and published their findings in the journal Science on 20 May 1983. A team led by Robert Gallo of the United States published similar findings in the same issue of Science and later confirmed the discovery of the virus and