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Luc Montagnier, the discoverer of HIV, last week announced the creation
of a private AIDS foundation that he says will fund ‘risky’ and ‘innovative’
research that established bodies may ignore.

Montagnier, who is the cofounder of the World Foundation for Research
and Prevention of AIDS along with the director-general of UNESCO, Federico
Mayor, says the foundation will be faster, more efficient and more flexible
than existing governmental and international organisations. He says the
bureaucracies of organisations such as the WHO are ‘too heavy’.

The foundation will fund basic and clinical AIDS research as well as
humanitarian projects. It plans to open three centres for clinical trials,
in Paris, Africa and the US, where new treatments will be tested on patients
with HIV. Setting up the centres is expected to cost 180 million francs
( £22 million) while annual operating costs may run to 150 million
francs.

France’s health minister, Bernard Kouchner, says the Paris centre will
be opened this year. The foundation will also give 5 million francs this
year to support the education of orphans in Uganda whose parents have died
from AIDS.

Montagnier argues that AIDS researchers are concentrating too heavily
on HIV rather than looking into cofactors such as mycoplasmas, microorganisms
without cell walls that he believes may amplify the effects of the virus.
He says money from the foundation would go towards research in this area
at his laboratory at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. ‘It is already going
on but it needs more money,’ he says. In recent years, Montagnier’s focus
on mycoplasmas has led him away from the mainstream of AIDS research. Many
scientists are sceptical about his conclusions.

Montagnier says that the type of research he is conducting has been
seen by the scientific community as ‘too risky for public money’, and that
he has in the past been frustrated by difficulties with getting funds. He
says he also wants to fund research into finding new antibiotics for infections,
such as tuberculosis, which affect AIDS patients.

‘More funding, innovation, creativity and thinking are needed,’ he says.
He compares the methods of the private foundation to those of the wartime
Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb by taking pure science
and applying it to an urgent practical problem. Many other researchers have
mooted the idea of such a project for AIDS.

Montagnier says that decisions on funding research will be made by a
committee of scientists. ‘I am democratic and will seek outside opinions,’
he says. ‘But as president of the foundation I will take the ultimate responsibility
for each decision.’

Ariel Francais, deputy director of the European bureau of the United
Nations Development Programme, says that the UNDP backs Montagnier’s anti-establishment
approach. ‘We recognise that denial and resistance to change has been the
prevailing attitude during this epidemic’s first decade,’ says Francais.