Being the initiator of the Gargamelle experiment at CERN, his work was of paramount importance in the discovery of neutral currents — the first experimental indication of the existence of the Z0 boson.

Born in Aurillac, France, André Lagarrigue was admitted to École Polytechnique in Paris in 1945, specializing in the field of weapons engineering.

However, while still a student at École Polytechnique he was attracted to the field of experimental physics, and participated in an experiment designed to determine the mass of the muon using a cloud chamber.

[3] He wrote the first published proposal for Gargamelle, dated 10 February 1964, and gathered a collaboration consisting of seven laboratories: École Polytechnique Paris, RWTH Aachen, ULB Bruxelles, Istituto di Fisica dell'Università di Milano, LAL Orsay, University College London and CERN.

[3] During the next years he led the collaboration to many important discoveries, amongst others that of the neutral currents in both leptonic and hadronic events, and the experimental proof of the fractional charges of the quarks.