The virus that causes AIDS is discovered by French and American scientists.
Luc Montagnier, born in 1932, is a French virologist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiologi and Medicine in 2008 by Karolinska Institutet along with his friend and colleague Francoise-Barré Sinoussi , both from the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hospital Bichat in Paris, asked Luc Montagnier for advice and assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, known at the time as GRID, Gay related immune deficiency, as the sick patients were mostly gay men. Rozenbaum had proposed at scientific meetings that the cause of the disease might be a retrovirus. Montagnier, his close associates Francoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann and others in the Pasteur team, had by then extensive experience with retroviruses. They examined samples taken from dr. Rozenbaums patients and found the virus that later was named HIV, in a lymph node biopsy. They named it first LAV, or ”Lymphadenopathy-associated virus”. The discovery took place in 1983 and in their first paper in Science in 1983, it was not yet proven to them that this actually was HIV, leading to AIDS.
A team led by Robert Gallo at the National Cancer Institute at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland, published similar findings in the same issue of Science and later confirmed the discovery of the virus and presented evidence that it caused AIDS. Gallo called the virus HTLV-III, (Human T-lymphocytic virus of type III), because the virus was similar to HTLV I and II, which had earlier been discovered in Gallo’s lab. Because of the timing of the discoveries, whether Montagnier´s or Gallo´s group was first to isolate HIV was for many years the subject of an intensive and very complicated dispute. The dispute was not cleared until President Ronald Reagan and President Francois Mitterand met in the White House in 1987 with the two scientists. The two scientists finally agreed to share credit for the discovery of HIV and in 1986 both the French name LAV and the US HTLV III was finally dropped and replaced with the name HIV.
They concluded that the origin of the HIV isolate discovered by Gallo was the same isolate as discovered by Montagnier (but not known to Montagnier at the time to cause AIDS). Montagnier had sent a sample of the isolate to Gallo’s lab. This compromise allowed Montagnier and Gallo to end their feud and collaborate with each other again, writing a chronology that appeared in Nature in 1986. They also signed articles together in Science in 2002, to show that they were now in agreement.