Soon after reports of a mysterious new disease began circulating in the early 1980s, describing predominantly gay patients with compromised immune systems and rare forms of cancer and pneumonia, Luc Montagnier began working to find the cause.
The French virologist, who has died aged 89, was a senior researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he directed a unit that focused on retroviruses, a group of insidious microbes that multiply by splicing their genetic material into a host cell’s genome. Like many of his colleagues, he suspected that one such virus was the culprit.
