Will there be a permanent cure for AIDS in our lifetime?

[OrphanPip]

Smallpox as mentioned above was never cured, but wiped out with a vaccine.
Hepatitis is still deadly, a friend of mine lost her brother in Argentina to it, and those who are rid of the disease are analogous to AIDS patients whose virus levels are undetectable do to the use of antiretroviral / protease inhibitor cocktails.

As for an HIV vaccine, this will be a hard sell as it will probably require that a weakened strain of the HIV virus itself be injected into your body. Vaccines like this might cause a small percentage to actually get the HIV virus until refined and even then a small number of people may develop AIDS-like immunity problems.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic, just stating the facts as I know them.

Well vaccine technology is advancing rapidly. For example, the Gardasil vaccine for HPV is a VLP (virus like particle) vaccine that is essentially a manufactured virus without any DNA (thus incapable of replicating). Unfortunately, the real problem with HIV is that antibodies against HIV virus antigens do not confer immunity. So, live or killed, the usual logic behind a vaccine doesn't work with HIV. The fact that HIV infects T-cells, which are an important part of adaptive immune response, doesn't help things either.