Montagnier visited Oviedo to be presented with the award by H.R.H. Don Felipe de Borbón in 2000.

Luc Montagnier has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. The Prince of Asturias Foundation had acknowledged Montagnier's career when he was bestowed with the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research eight years ago, together with Robert C. Gallo.

Luc Montagnier (born in 1932 in Chabris, Indre, France) is a doctor in Medicine, and has a first degree in Science from the University of Poitiers, in Paris, where he began his career in teaching. In 1967 he was appointed head of Research, and in 1975 he became director for France's National Centre for Scientific Research. He has also headed the Viral Oncology Unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris since 1972. He spent three years doing research in England into virus replication mechanisms in RNA, and, back in France, began to study retrovirus, and in particular Rous sarcoma, at the Curie Institute.

In 1983 he discovered the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, for which work he is considered as the father of the HIV discovery (Human Immunodeficiency Virus - the original cause of AIDS). He is now president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, and has also recently joined Queens College, New York as a researcher. His present research centres around the mechanisms by which HIV induces the decline of CD4 lymphocytes, the regulation of virus latency and expression, and HIV-induced encephalopathy. He has published extensively and given conferences all over the world. He is a Knight of the French Legion of Honour, and has received many awards, such as the Rosen Prize for Oncology (1971), the Scientific and Technological Foundation of Japan's Award (1988), and the King Faisal Award (1993). He was recently named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Havana (Cuba).

The minutes of the Jury, from 7th May 2000, state that the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research went to Robert G. Gallo and Luc Montagnier "in recognition of the originality, quality and scope of their scientific work, and of its practical importance for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of the HIV infection and AIDS.

In his search for the agents that cause leukemias in the human species, the researcher Robert Gallo conceived and developed in his laboratory methods which led to the discovery of the first human retrovirus - HTLV1 and HTLV2 - agents for certain types of leukemia.

Professor Luc Montagnier described the first AIDS virus, known at the time as LAV, which was later accepted as the first HIV1. He then went on to also describe HIV-2. He has made a major contribution to our knowledge of programmed cell death and apoptosis (...)".