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HIV Discoverer Luc Montagnier Dead at 89
The New York Times reports.His discovery was important but not without controversy. The deadly disease that had first surfaced in 1981 and was eventually given the name of AIDS, for acquired immune deficiency syndrome, was devastating gay and bisexual men, along with certain other populations, but its cause remained mysterious for some time.Some scientists, however, suspected it was caused by a retrovirus, “a kind of germ that slips into the host cell’s DNA and takes control, in a reversal of the way viruses typically work; hence the name retro,” the Times notes.Montagnier, an expert on retroviruses, and his team at the Pasteur Institute did research in 1983 on a lymph node that had been removed from a person with AIDS.