[12] In 1982, Willy Rozenbaum, a clinician at the Hôpital Bichat hospital in Paris, asked Montagnier for assistance in establishing the cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS (known at the time as "gay-related immune deficiency" or GRID).
Montagnier and members of his group at the Pasteur Institute, notably including Françoise Barré-Sinoussi and Jean-Claude Chermann, had extensive experience with retroviruses.
[15] Montagnier and his team examined samples taken from Rozenbaum's AIDS patients in 1983 and found the virus that would later become known as HIV in a lymph node biopsy.
[17] A team led by Robert Gallo of the United States published similar findings in the same issue of Science and later confirmed the discovery of the virus and presented evidence that it caused AIDS.
A US government patent for the AIDS test, filed by the United States Department of Health and Human Services and based on what was claimed to be Gallo's identification of the virus, was at stake.
[27][28][29] In 1987, both governments attempted to end the dispute by arranging to split the prestige of the discovery and the proceeds from the patent 50–50,[30] naming Montagnier and Gallo co-discoverers.
[26] On 29 November 2002 issue of Science, Gallo and Montagnier published a series of articles, one of which was co-written by both scientists, in which they acknowledged the pivotal roles that each had played in the discovery of HIV.
[42] In 2009, Montagnier published two controversial independent research studies, one of which was entitled "Electromagnetic Signals Are Produced by Aqueous Nanostructures Derived from Bacterial DNA Sequences".
[43][44] Jeff Reimers, of the University of Sydney, said that if its conclusions are true, "these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry".
"[50] He "stunned his colleagues ... when he presented a new method for detecting viral infections that bore close parallels to the basic tenets of homeopathy.
Although fellow Nobel prize winners – who view homeopathy as quackery – were left openly shaking their heads, Montagnier's comments were rapidly embraced by homeopaths eager for greater credibility.
[51] The homeopathy paper met with harsh criticism for not being peer-reviewed, and its claims unsubstantiated by modern mainstream conventions of physics and chemistry.
[45][53][54] In a 24 December 2010 Science magazine interview entitled "French Nobelist Escapes 'Intellectual Terror' to Pursue Radical Ideas in China", he was questioned about his research and plans.
He also mentioned that his applications for funding had been turned down and that he was leaving his home country to set up shop in China so he could escape what he called the "intellectual terror" which he claimed had prevented others from publishing their results.
He described the paper as "one of the more unprofessional write-ups I've ever run across",[53] and criticized the publication process as having an "unbelievable turnaround" time: "another suspicious sign are the dates.
Similar to the controversy he aroused by extolling homeopathy, his latest group, Chronimed, claimed to have made a discovery for autistic children that was sharply criticized by computational biologist Steven Salzberg.
The letter read: "We, academics of medicine, cannot accept that one of our peers is using his Nobel prize [status] to spread dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge.
According to Montagnier, the "presence of elements of HIV and germ of malaria in the genome of coronavirus is highly suspect and the characteristics of the virus could not have arisen naturally.
"[60] Montagnier's conclusions were rejected as hasty by the scientific community, considering the gene sequences were common among similar organisms;[6] no evidence arose that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered.