Luc Montagnier Quotes

There exist thousands of Americans who have AIDS-defining diseases but are HIV negative.

When AIDS first appeared, people didn't know what it was. You'll remember that it affected mostly young gay men - it was actually called GRID for a short period of time: Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Syndrome - and people thought it actually might be recreational drugs or other types of toxins.

The nature of a protective immune response to HIV is still unclear. Because in a very, very unique manner, unlike virtually any other microbe with which we're familiar, the HIV virus has evolved in a way that the immune system finds it very difficult, if not impossible, to deal with the virus.

I run a modest-sized laboratory that's looking specifically at what we call 'the pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease, or AIDS.'

Many key concepts concerning the nature of immunity have originated from the very practical need to control virus infections.

A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future.

As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted.

Your medical documents will say Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome that is AIDS. What that means you have got this challenge of immune deficiency. Alright what causes immune deficiency? HIV. Alright. Is that all that causes immune deficiency? The medical textbooks will say there are other things that cause immune deficiency. There is also genetic immune deficiency that is a different phenomenon.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

AIDS is such a scary thing and it's also the kind of thing that you think won't happen to you. It can happen to you and it's deadly serious.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

If a healthy person were placed on the other side of a room from a person who was sick with AIDS, the AIDS virus would not be able to drift across the room through the air and infect the healthy person.

The right raw materials can... double or triple the protective power of the immune system.

The message has become clearer to the nation about AIDS. People used to think they could catch it all kinds of ways, but we now know that it is absolutely passed through bodily fluids.

This AIDS stuff is pretty scary. I hope I don't get it.

Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work.

The slow rejection of the foreign skin grafts fascinated me. How could the host distinguish another person's skin from his own?

When you vaccinate someone, or when you get infected, the microbe is presenting itself to the immune system in a way that the immune system recognizes the important elements of the microbe and makes an immune response, both an antibody response and a cellular response, to ultimately contain the microbe.

There are so many different varieties of HIV out there.

The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it, and it quickly hides itself in your genome.

When the AIDS epidemic broke, because I happened to be a science nerd and knew a lot about viruses and a lot about that virus at the time, I felt a moral obligation to go out and try to stem the fear and get out and explain to people what the disease was and how it worked.

Roughly speaking, this hypothesis asks whether drug use causes some of the diseases officially associated with AIDS, such as immunodeficiency and Kaposi's sarcoma.

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

An AIDS-free generation would mean that virtually no child is born with HIV; that, as those children grow up, their risk of becoming infected is far lower than it is today; and that those who become infected can access treatment to help prevent them from developing AIDS and from passing the virus on to others.

Once a disease has entered the body, all parts which are healthy must fight it: not one alone, but all. Because a disease might mean their common death. Nature knows this; and Nature attacks the disease with whatever help she can muster.