A Swiss doctor discovered these tiny, fragile children in a remote Indian village in 2003. Their bones were dissolving and their hair thining and he diagnosed them with progeria, a rare disease that uncontrollably accelerates its sufferers into old age. Even relative to what is already known about the disease, the children remain a medical mystery. One mother had given birth to five children who had been affected, despite an established average of one sufferer in every 4 million births.