If you’ve ever played The New York Times game Connections, you know the feeling. You’re staring at a grid of words, knowing the solution is there, but unable to see how the pieces fit together. All you can do is work with the words in front of you. There are no extra clues, no new information coming. The only option is to shuffle, to look at the same information in a different arrangement until patterns begin to appear. 

Nothing about the problem changes. Then something about how you see it does. 

This pattern of reframing is a familiar truth in scientific research as well. In a recent NPR podcast, “The Medical Matchmaking Machine,” Radiolab explores this idea through a deeply human story. The episode features Dr. David Fajgenbaum, who survived a rare, life-threatening illness and came away with a new realization about the limits of how existing knowledge was being connected. By systematically reexamining existing data and research through a new lens, he was able to identify life-saving connections for his own disease. Through his nonprofit research organization Every Cure, Fajgenbaum then began applying the same approach more broadly across diseases.  

In many cases, potential treatments already exist, but they are buried in data, scattered across studies, or confined to discovery pathways that make connections difficult to see.