AIDS vaccine will only be in dreams.

A dream to find a new vaccine for AIDS will remain as a dream, a Nobel laureate David Baltimore, a leading expert on the mechanism by which viral diseases take root, was quoted as saying by the British newspaper Guardian.

The paper quoted Baltimore, a biologist at Caltech and the winner of the 1975 Nobel prize for medicine for his discovery of an enzyme later identified as a key reproductive mechanism used by the HIV, saying that the disease was so complex that scientists were no closer to a vaccine today than they were 25 years ago.

Baltimore, who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, gave the opening address of its annual meeting in Boston recently, and highlighted the “sad topic” of the search for the AIDS vaccine.

“We’ve been working on that vaccine since then (the early 1980s, when the possibility of a vaccine was mooted) and we are no closer to a vaccine now than we were then,” the Guardian quoted Baltimore as saying. “I still think an Aids vaccine is 10 years away. You are quite within bounds to ask, if it’s been 10 years away for 20 years, does that mean it’s really never going to happen? There are people saying it will never happen.”

The latest disappointment in the search for the vaccine came last year, after a trial of a promising vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Merck was halted when some recipients were left more prone to HIV.