Science is elastic. Its findings can be stretched to sell useless gadgets and to sow mistrust. Often, this distortion of the truth is done outside of academia by merchants of doubt, spiritual influencers, and credulous entrepreneurs who do not understand that the most important lesson in research is humility.
But once in a while, science is stretched beyond recognition by academic researchers themselves, whose extracurricular beliefs have morphed into an all-encompassing philosophy that moves them away from the rigours of science and into the arms of magical thinking.
Having a doctorate or a medical degree does immunize you against nonsense; but like a vaccine, a scientific education is never 100% effective.
This is the story of how, eight years ago, a new organ was discovered. Except it wasn’t new and it wasn’t necessarily an organ. It’s about the messy question of who dragged this discovery into the realm of alternative medicine. And it’s about a pathologist who became convinced that his ageing mother’s conversations with dead people were real, and that some folks with dementia could see cosmic truths the rest of us ignore.
This is the story of our interstitium.
A mapping expedition
You may recall the ubiquitous headlines in 2018: scientists had discovered a new organ and they had baptized it the interstitium. Except that the press was misled. The interstitium wasn’t new. As always, primary sources—the 2018 paper itself and interviews with its authors—can help us understand exactly what these scientists claim to have discovered.
It began with two doctors at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. They were examining a patient’s bile duct to see if cancer had spread. Bile ducts are canals that move bile around and connect our liver, gallbladder, and small intestine. The doctors—David Carr-Locke and Petros Benias—noticed cavities that were connected to each other and which did not show up in anatomy textbooks. They wanted to take a closer look, so they did what medical doctors do: they took a sample and sent it to pathology. But when the slices were inspected under a microscope, the impossible cavities had vanished. It looked like the doctors were being gaslit by their patient’s anatomy.
The team later figured out what had happened. When a biological tissue sample is received in pathology for it to get sliced and mounted onto a glass slide, the tissue is drained of its liquids. These mysterious cavities had been full of fluid and had simply collapsed during processing, so that they were essentially invisible under the microscope.
So, the doctors returned with a bit of modern technology: a long tube that can be inserted inside a patient’s cavity and that is fitted with a tiny camera that can act as a microscope, what is known as probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy. They were able to look inside these cavities and see a complex grid of thick collagen fibres in a sort of gel. They could freeze these cavities, fluids and all, and bring them into the lab to study them. And that’s when they realized that they had stumbled upon a known structure that had never been mapped out.
The cells that make up our bodies are not completely stuck to each other; often, there is stuff in between them, in the interstices, to use a fancy word. This stuff is a fluid that contains certain molecules, like collagen, and it eventually gets drained into our lymphatic system, the series of vessels in charge of fluid filtration and sewage.
The totality of this stuff in between our cells was known as the interstitium, but there were occasional debates as to whether or not it was one thing or a series of isolated environments. To use a metaphor, the question was, are those individual ponds or are they lakes connected to rivers that drain into seas?
The key discovery by that team in New York in 2018 was not that there was a bit of fluid between our cells (which we knew), but that the interstitium could balloon into structures rather substantial in size and that these structures indeed had fluid in them and could be better studied by preserving this fluid. The researchers found these structures not just in bile ducts but in the skin, the lungs, and various tissues inside the body. We used to believe that organs were enveloped by densely packed bundles of collagen as a foam-like shock absorption system; but this paper revealed that this collagen was in a fluid. Where once we thought we were looking at forests on dryland, we now realize we were staring at an aquatic ecosystem filled with corals and algae. It’s a reminder that the tools you use to do science will shape what you find and what you miss.
Was this really a discovery... or more like the initial steps of mapping out a known structure using new technology? I’m still not entirely sure. The fact that this paper was rejected by eight different journals before getting published in a non-pathology journal makes me lean toward the latter.
Subsequent studies by this same team revealed that these discrete cavities within the interstitium did appear to be linked to each other. But by their own admission, there are still fundamental questions about the interstitium that remain unanswered to this day. If it’s all connected, how fast does its fluid move from one pocket to another? How far can it go? In a recent article published in New Scientist, one of the core members of the team, Dr. Rebecca G. Wells, put a damper on the excitement by stating that this interstitium was expected to be more like an ocean or a bath and less like a river. This was not a new circulatory system on par with the vessels that move our blood around, at least not based on what we know.
And she had good reasons to invite people to curb their enthusiasm, as all sorts of wild claims were being made about the interstitium.
Its existence was now supposed to validate acupuncture, and it became the darling of osteopaths, whose obsession with fascia, the net-like connective tissue enveloping our muscles, started to merge with the interstitium itself. Papers were published claiming that this new discovery would reconcile the medical traditions of the East and the West, and that maybe the interstitium could explain autism.
The interstitium became a Rorschach test and everyone saw in it what they wanted to see. Whatever gap existed in our knowledge, the interstitium was squeezed into this gap as a potential answer.
The question was, who started to stretch this discovery into something it wasn’t?
The call is coming from inside the house
In a press release from NewYork-Presbytarian, the academic healthcare system where he practices, Dr. David Carr-Locke stressed that all those headlines about him and his colleagues having discovered a new “organ” were inaccurate. “We’re not saying that; the press did.”
But the day his eye-catching paper was published, NYU Langone Health pushed a press release about it. Its title? “Researchers find new ‘organ’ missed by gold standard methods for visualizing anatomy and disease.” It claims this new study is the first to define the interstitium as an organ, and one of the largest in the body, according to the authors of the paper. The paper itself makes no such claim.
This idea of the interstitium as an organ was repeated during an interview with Live Science, which was published as a Scientific American piece. This same interview revealed a surprising detail: one of the authors of the paper told the journalist that he was now planning on reviewing the scientific literature to understand what had already been published on the interstitium. Shouldn’t that have been done prior to boldly declaring a new organ had been found?
The Live Science reporter was also told that this interstitium is a “highway,” which implies high-speed movement, a tall claim that was not tested in the paper and which remains unproven to this day. Further quotes by one member of the New York team are eyebrow raising. In one, this interstitium is said to “probably”generate its own electrical current independent of our nervous system, the only proof given is that some of the molecules inside it have an electrical charge. The interstitium is positioned as the possible explanation behind energy healing and the reason why pulse diagnosis done in traditional Chinese medicine must work. And this researcher has also used the word “allopathic”—a derogatory term used by people who believe in so-called alternative medicine to denounce conventional medicine—in a recent review article on the interstitium.
All of these peculiarities can be traced back to the pathologist who played a key role in the original discovery, Dr. Neil D. Theise.
Theise has been living two lives and he is in the process of merging them. His academic path led him to do groundbreaking work on adult stem cells, which was referenced by George W. Bush during a presidential address on stem cell research. He has published papers in the big three science journals: Nature, Cell, and Science. But Theise is also a practicing Buddhist with a strong interest in Jewish mysticism, and he has woven his scientific and spiritual passions into a popular book called Notes on Complexity. This tome on how everything is connected drew the attention of the woo-woo digital media sphere, and he gave numerous interviews during which he admitted that this book was not the one he had really wanted to write.
The one he is dying to publish is about his mom, whose failing brain apparently gave her the ability to speak to the dead, travel outside of her body, and find herself in remission from all of her diseases.
Dementia or enlightenment?
Theise, who comes from a long line of rabbis interested in understanding and interacting with the divine, was in conversation with an artist who told him about complexity theory. It’s the idea that the complex behaviour of masses can’t be explained by simply studying the individual. No matter how thorough your examination of a single ant is, you will not be able to predict how an ant colony behaves.
This notion bloomed inside of Theise, who had always felt like he was connected to everything. He would find himself as an adult waiting to cross an intersection on foot, suddenly unable to move as he saw his leg as a colony of cells and no longer as a limb capable of movement. He would stare at the burning incense stick during a meditation and get choked up by the fact that it was neither stick nor smoke; it was both. Our bodies could be broken down into organs, then tissues, then cells, then molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles, and so could the entire universe.
He arrived at the conclusion that the god he believes in has to contemplate himself, and in doing so, he becomes two separate things: the observer and the observed, which creates our universe.
While this may sound like the pseudo-profound ramblings of a man smoking pot with his friends, these stories never fail to impress the podcasters Theise speaks to. The Big Bang Theory’s Mayim Bialik, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, literally spends the outro to her interview of Theise off her chair and on the floor.
This staggering open-mindedness on Theise’s part leads him to talk about his now-deceased mother, who initially lost her ability to keep short-term memories and stopped walking, talking, and eating—Theise insists she did not have dementia. Except that she eventually started having conversations with dead relatives, and spirit guides began showing up, allegedly. Theise spoke to one of the shamans he knows, who had had some conversation with Theise’s mom in a spiritual dimension, and apparently the reports matched, which was proof to Theise that she was indeed accessing some sort of non-material plane of existence. Then, her Parkinson’s disease went away, alongside her high blood pressure and her heart failure, and she was the happiest she’d ever been.
Theise argues that when your brain is dying, you are no longer thinking about yourself and are thus more open to feeling the consciousness of the universe. You stop eating because, he says, you’re busy “elsewhere.”
On a podcast dedicated to near-death experiences and mediumship, the host wonders if our brain is “dead” when we’re alive and it’s only when we get dementia that we’re truly alive. Theise, who was introduced as “a serious scientist,” replies, “Exactly.”
Doctor Strange and the exuberance of madness
Materialism is the idea that nothing exists except for matter. No heaven, no hell, no spiritual dimension. Science is firmly rooted in materialism. But Theise admits on Bialik’s podcast that in his writings he is “trying to write a takedown of materialism.”
If this reminds you of Deepak Chopra, you should know that Theise has indeed collaborated with him.
Reframing dementia as clairvoyance is dangerous stuff, and it put to my mind the breakout hit podcast The Telepathy Tapes, where compassion likewise turns to veneration. In The Telepathy Tapes, children with severe autism who do not communicate are “assisted” around letter boards to “reveal” that they have deep, vibrant lives in a mystical dimension called The Hill. With Theise, meanwhile, older adults who tragically lose their ability to take care of themselves are portrayed as mouthpieces for the great beyond. It’s no wonder that Theise himself was interviewed on The Telepathy Tapes.
The interstitium, then, becomes biological proof that everything, as Theise believes, is indeed connected. It must be an organ, the biggest one in the body, a highway which explains how cancer spreads and why acupuncture really does work, the important mesh that connects East and West. It was hiding in plain sight, much like the esoteric secrets of the universe that fascinate mystics, and Theise himself was there to uncover it, thanks to his attunement to the interconnectedness of our universe.
Putting our science caps firmly back on, I think that the interstitium is real and that more studies of it—especially studies done by groups other than Theise’s—are warranted. As that 2018 paper hypothesized, the interstitium may—may!—explain the early spread of a cancerous tumour before it truly metastasizes to distant parts of the body. Drawing doctors’ eyes onto this interstitial network has the far-future potential to help them better diagnose certain conditions, and already there is research into a vaccine that would attract cancer-killing immune cells to the interstitium to stop a type of skin cancer in its tracks.
But before we present this shock-absorbing network of squishy pockets as the reason why acupuncture works, we need to prove that it works. While acupuncture has been tested for just about anything, a systematic review published in 2022 concluded that a) most of this work is so bad that we can’t take its results with certainty and b) what we can conclude with certainty is that, when acupuncture is rigorously pitted against a placebo, it performs no better. Quite tellingly, every trial that comes out of China for this Chinese practice “shows” that it works, whereas trials from other countries are much more mixed. Acupuncture is a pre-scientific intervention that, alongside astrology and demonology, was repackaged as patriotic medicine by Chairman Mao Zedong in the middle of the 20th century, although he himself admitted he did not believe it worked.
It is unfortunate that new information on a known anatomical structure is being distorted by one of the physicians involved in the study to fit some cosmological agenda he has. In one of his interviews, Theise mentions that, when he was helping doctors with liver transplants, they didn’t mind his spiritual leaps of faith. “An advantage to being a pathologist, both as a scientist and ‘crazy,’ is that as long as I got my diagnoses right looking at the slides, the transplant team was happy with me. They didn’t care what I was talking about. Some of them would go, ‘Crazy Neil’....”
Earlier this year, Theise retired and moved to Portugal with his husband in the wake of Trump’s re-election. This will undoubtedly free him up to continue stretching science to fit his view that at least some people with dementia can clearly see the divine nature of our universe. His follow-up book—the one he really wanted to write, called Sarah in the In-Between—is set to be published next year.
A university education is like a vaccine against baloney. I just wish it were more effective.
