Medical researchers have found a network of fluid-filled spaces that they’d not really noticed before in connective tissue all over the body: below the skin’s surface; lining the digestive tract, lungs, and urinary systems; and surrounding muscles. It amounts, some argue, to a new “organ.” In any case, Jennifer Brandel suggests, it has much to teach us about our relationship with the world at large…
In 2018, scientists discovered a new organ (?) in the human body. You’d think after centuries of cutting ourselves open, we’d know the intimate details of the structures within us by now. Strangely, this body part wasn’t missed because it was invisible; it was overlooked because of what our belief systems wouldn’t let us perceive.
Until quite recently, if doctors wanted to study human tissue from a living person, they had to remove it first. Then they’d essentially mummify it: drying, freezing, slicing, and fixing it on a slide so they could peer at its shriveled dead form under a microscope to ascertain what was happening at a cellular level. As a result, scientists and doctors were taught in medical school that collagen tissue is essentially a dense wall: a barrier.
But a new endoscope, a microscope that snakes into the body through one of two holes (pie- or butt-), now enables us to see and study living tissue inside a breathing body with a beating heart. And once this special endoscope shone its light just below the skin into the collagen layer, it revealed something much more like a sponge than a wall, with fluid rushing between a fractal, honeycombed network.
The ‘they,’ here, of course doesn’t include everyone. Where Western, allopathic medicine focuses on isolating and treating symptoms, Traditional Chinese Medicine has for 2,500 years looked at the body as a dynamic, fluid-oriented system, and takes a more holistic approach to understanding root causes of discomfort and disease. Western doctors and scientists have often lacked the rubric to appreciate the efficacy of acupuncture, despite studies by reputable bodies like the NIH showing its measurable benefits.
Nor have Western doctors come to fully understand and appreciate the role of fascia — the dense collagen network that supports the structure of our musculature and keeps our bones and body aligned. Rolfers, Osteopaths, myofascial workers have been working for years with fascia structure and the fluid within it, looking at the health of the entire body through a lens of interconnection, dependent relationships, and movement.
We now have a shared language, or at least a word, for this system — or this organ, or this infrastructure (depending on whom you ask) — that’s been revealed as a fluid-filled superhighway spanning the entire body. It’s called: the interstitium. It’s such a new word that my autocorrect feature keeps wanting me to change it to “interstitial.”
… The structure of the interstitium is fractal; it exhibits the same pattern at various scales. It’s unified. While scientists had seen glimpses of this mesh-like network before, they had not realized that it connected the entire body — just underneath the skin, and wrapping around organs, arteries, capillaries, veins, head to toes. It’s juicy. It moves four times more fluid through the body than the vascular system does. The fluid isn’t blood, it’s a clear and “pre-lymphatic” substance, carrying within it nutrients, information, and new kinds of cells that are only just being discovered. It’s also a conduit for cancer spread. Turns out that cancer cells moving through the interstitium’s channels are fast.
In short: it’s very important. And it’s wild that, although the interstitium can be seen with the naked eye during surgery, it wasn’t really noticed until now. There is an entire scientific revolution set to unfurl as more studies are peer-reviewed and more science books and classrooms integrate its existence into their cosmologies. We are at the beginning of it all.
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The reason I’m so hyped about this discovery, despite my last science class having been decades ago, is that the interstitium is a conceptual skeleton key, unlocking a more sophisticated, accurate way of seeing everything in the environment.
In the early modern period, Western scientists conceived of the world in terms of parts, of individuals. Everything was seen as a unit. A molecule, a cell, an organ, a person, a … noun. That’s no accident. The microscope plays an outsized role.
Before microscopes were invented, the composition of the body was a matter of philosophical debate. Aristotle, for instance, believed that the heart was the seat of intelligence and that the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. There were long-held beliefs attributed to divine influences, and diseases and recoveries were due to the favor or wrath of deities.
But once the microscope came along, it ushered in a worldview premised on individual identity. The first eyes to peer through those early eyepieces spotted what looked like empty boxes. English scientist Robert Hooke in 1665 coined them as “cells” because they reminded him of the small rooms where monks lived in monasteries. This formative moment led to a worldview called “cell-doctrine” — focusing on things — cells, this basic unit of life from which all living things are composed. Similar cells bundle to form tissues, which then cooperate to form organs, which then carry out the functions necessary to sustain the life of an organism, was how the thinking has gone.
We didn’t pay attention to all of the dynamic, fluid phenomenon, unseen and in between, which connects the organs to one another, and allows the whole system to communicate and stay in homeostasis.
And we grafted this same thinking onto how we organize labor and society. Similar people bundle to form departments, which then cooperate to form companies, which then carry out the functions to sustain our collective communities, countries and world. The enforcement of this model starts young. We ask children, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, not “how do you want to be when you grow up?” We divide knowledge into subjects, disciplines, majors, then sectors and industries and specific job titles.
We need more navigators skipping between these constructed categories to subvert and replace a perspective of separation that has reached its limits and logical conclusion.
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“We perceive only that part of nature that our technologies permit,” writes Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp, and Alfred I. Tauber, “and so too, our theories about nature are highly constrained to what our technologies enable us to observe.” In other words, our cosmologies, worldviews, conceptions of the environment and how it works, are limited or expanded by what we can perceive. Our experiences then transmute into the metaphors and grammar that organize our thoughts. New language gives us new worldviews.
The Potawatomi plant ecologist, writer and an actual MacArthur fellow, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Science can be a language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts; it’s a language of objects.” And in Orion she writes, “The relationship between the structure of a language and the behavior characteristic of a culture, is not a causal one, but many linguists and psychologists agree that language reveals unconscious cultural assumptions and exerts some influence over patterns of thought.”
She wonders, “Can we make a new world with new words?”
Which makes me wonder, how can we activate and apply this new word, interstitium, to harness its meaning and power beyond biology? What will it take to find ways of seeing, languaging and remunerating interstitionary work, so our systems have a chance at correcting and finding balance? No one sector, industry or organization will be able to solve the wicked problems we face in challenges like climate or poverty or corruption…
Re-understanding human biology– and our place in the world: “Invisible Landscapes,” from @JenniferBrandel in @Orion_Magazine.
Listen to the Radiolab episode to which this essay is a companion here.
Learn more about the interstitium in “Meet Your Interstitium, a Newfound ‘Organ’” (source of the image at the top).
* Ed Catmull
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As we reorient, we might spare a thought for Mary Leakey; she died on this date in 1996. A archaeologist and paleontologist, she made several of the most important fossil finds subsequently interpreted and publicized by her husband, the noted anthropologist Louis Leakey. For every vivid claim made by Louis about the origins of man, the supporting evidence tended to come from Mary’s scrupulous scientific approach. As “the woman who found our ancestors”, Mary’s work in East Africa shed new light on human evolution.
After Louis’ death in 1972, she enjoyed her most spectacular find: three trails of fossilized hominid footprints 3.6 million years old, which she discovered at Laetoli in Tanzania (1978-9) showing man’s ancestors were walking upright at a much earlier period than previously believed.
