Luc Montagnier, French virologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
Luc Montagnier (US: ; US: , French: [mɔ̃taɲje]; 18 August 1932 – 8 February 2022) was a French virologist and joint recipient, with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Harald zur Hausen, 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".