The Perils of Ignoring Floppy Bunny Ears: How Focus Can Lead to Failure

Being Overly Focused Makes Us Miss Some Great Things

In 1954, the researcher Lewis Thomas hit an impasse while studying rheumatic fever. He was injecting rabbits with an enzyme that should have mimicked the fever’s symptoms. Instead, he got something else: four hours after the injections, the rabbits’ ears began curling at the tips; 18 hours in, they were completely wilted, flopping at the sides of their heads like tired flower petals. Thomas’s findings in the changes to the cartilage led to breakthroughs in our understanding of connective tissue what we now know about rheumatoid arthritis.

This wasn’t the first time anyone noticed the startling, consistent side effect from this particular chemical. Cornell researcher Dr. Aaron Kellner, noticed it five years earlier, but eventually chose to abandon looking into it: he was making progress on some of his other projects; his specialty was muscle tissue; the floppiness of the ears made it difficult for him to take the side effect seriously. He ended up using “floppy ears” as a sign that they rabbits had received the proper dosage: if the rabbits died, they’d received too much; if their ears didn’t flop, they needed more. Kellner was too busy exploiting his own line of research, and only looked at the bunny cartilage superficially. Thomas’s papers were featured in the New York Times, and he became the dean of NYU’s medical school.