Augustine Pamplany CST
Luc Montagnier (1932-2008) was a French Scientist who passed away on 8 February 2022. He became famous for his discovery of the HIV Virus. He was awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his contributions to the identification of the HIV Virus. Montagnier and his team found out the Virus in 1983. American scientist Robert Gallo also identified the Virus from the samples received from Montagnier’s lab in the same year and both of them published their findings in the same issue of Science in 1983. Although Montagnier was the first to discover the Virus, it was Hallo who established that HIV is the cause of the AIDS disease.
When Nobel Prize was awarded to Montagnier and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi for the discovery of HIV in 2008, Montagnier said that he was “surprised” at Gallo being not recognized. “It was important to prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS, and Gallo had a very important role in that. I’m very sorry for Robert Gallo.” Apart from the Nobel Prize, he was recipient of over 20 prestigious international awards.
Montagnier was educated at the University of Poitiers and the University of Paris. He was the former Director of the Pasteur Institute. He co-founded the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention. He also founded the World Foundation for Medical Research and Prevention based in Houston.
Being an agnostic – who thinks we cannot know whether there is God or not – Montagnier is no icon in science-religion dialogue. However, despite being an agnostic, his openness to religious beliefs had been incredible. This was proven in his remarks on the miracles at Lourdes. He had a conversation with the Cistercian monk, Niassaut, In his book, The Nobel Laureate and the Monk. In this conversation, Niassaut asked Montagnier how he viewed the miracles in Lourdes as a non-believer. To the surprise of Niassaut, Montagnier replied, “When a phenomenon is inexplicable, if it really exists, then there’s no reason to deny it.” According to Montagnier, nonbelievers must not regard themselves as super intellectuals against what they are unable to understand. Non-believers must not jump into hasty conclusions about what they do not understand. Montagnier conceded that the healings at Lourdes are inexplicable. Those healings are unforeseen by the sciences.
“Many scientists make the mistake of rejecting what they do not understand. I do not like that attitude. I often quote the phrase of the astrophysicist Carl Sagan: ‘The absence of proof is not proof of absence.’ As for the miracles of Lourdes that I studied, I think it really is something inexplicable. I cannot understand those miracles, but I recognize that there are cures that are not foreseen in the current state of science.” It should be noted that though there are thousands of reports of healings in Lourdes, the Church has formally recognised only 70 miracles to date.
