2008 Nobel Laureate for physiology or medicine from France, Luc Antoine Montagnier, caught the media’s attention when he recently endorsed a COVID-19 conspiracy theory – that the virus is human-made. His proclamation was subsequently magnified by various news outlets, including many in India (e.g., The Week, The Hindu Businessline, and Times of India).
Montagnier argued during a TV interview with a French TV channel that elements of the HIV-1 retrovirus, which he co-discovered in 1983, can be found in the genome of the new coronavirus. He also said elements of the “malaria germ” – the parasite Plasmodium falciparum – can also be seen in the virus’s genome.
His full quote: “We were not the first since a group of Indian researchers tried to publish a study which showed that the complete genome of this coronavirus [has] sequences of another virus, which is HIV.”
In a separate podcast episode with a different outlet, Montagnier further said the virus had escaped in an “industrial accident” from the Wuhan city laboratory when Chinese scientists were attempting to develop a vaccine against HIV.
The new coronavirus is an RNA virus, like HIV. Scientists already know that many viruses incorporate pieces of other genomes into their own in the natural course of evolution, both of plants and animals. Indeed, fully 43% of the human genome is composed of mobile genetic element sequences, which are the leftovers of viral infections that our ancestors experienced over the last 300,000 years.
The new virus also has an exceptionally large genome, of about 30,000 nucleobases. Mobile genetic elements have been discovered in many viruses with large genomes, including coronaviruses. The Indian study Montagnier referred to had been authored by a team from IIT Delhi, among others. They had uploaded their manuscript to the bioRxiv preprint repository only to quickly take it down after commentators pointed out numerous errors in their analysis.
