This work describes the efforts made to solve one of medicine's oldest mysteries - scleroderma. Based on results obtained at Harvard Medical School, under the joint sponsorship of the Road Back Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the text aims to offer hope to those afflicted with this slow and agonizing condition. During a conference in 1999, the Sixth Biennial Congress of the International Society for Rheumatic Therapy, physicians learned that scleroderma could be cured.