N-sane in the membrane

"The N gland," I suggested, "was named thus by analogy with Blondlot's N-rays."


"Speaking of mysterious glands," tigris said, "remember Pishinger's Space?"

"It is akin to the Schade Organ," I said.

"I know that one," Another Kiwi vouchsafed. "Dr Phibes wrests doleful discords from its keyboard as a musical expression of the torment in his soul."

"They are both forms of distributed interstitial connective tissue," I interrupted in the Explaining Voice; "unknown outside of Alt-Health websites where the crank magnetism goes up to 11 Teslas."

...the extracellular space that contains the fluids that bath and feed each and every cell while carrying away the waste from those same cells...
This organ connects and holds everything in our bodies in place. This organ is composed of ligaments, tendons, sinew, and the finer fibers that become the scaffolding that holds every single cell in our bodies in place.

"Are you loonies ranting about telocytes again?" head barmaid Evangeline van Holsterin asked as she swept past to wipe the table-top dry before the spillage of Old Blandings Scythe Sharpener etched rings in the faux-bacon formica finish.

Special pint glass for Scythe Sharpener;
leaves no rings but prone to falling over

Indeed, arguing we were. In our defense, the prospect of the Telocyte as an entirely new class of cell is tremendously exciting to everyone at the Riddled Research Laboratory and Tractor Parts Exchange. Paying members of the public have grown increasingly skeptical of outlandish claims about 'stem-cell implants', so new cells with unknown and potentially unlimited properties are just what is needed for our commercial operation at the Bona Body-Part Embellishment & Rejuvenation Clinic (ask about this week's special on vat-grown penis!).

According to Professor Popescu [whom God preserve] of Bucharest, the distinguishing features of telocytes are the long, extremely fine 'telopode' extensions -- invisible to optical microscopy -- which wind their wendy way around other cells, occasionally bulging out in blobs of protoplasm in the manner of a partially-constructed balloon animal.

Skeptics might marvel at the way these filaments confine themselves to a plane as they meander around... a plane always coinciding with the slice taken for electron microscopy. But concerns are assuaged by the reassuring fact that Popescu and his colleagues -- having first encountered telocytes in gut muscle -- have since found them everywhere they've looked. They are the duct-tape that holds exocrine glands together (as opposed to endocrine glands which require ductless tape).

Also, telosites have their own webcyte and a Whackyweedia entry. Theory has it that they carry signals, providing a kind of cellular intranet, allowing the constituent cells of each organ to coordinate their holidays, exchange lists of jokes, and regenerate after injury.

Telocyte-seers Edelstein and Smythies are especially enthusiastic about the evidence. Fortunately the Frontiers journal is there as an outlet for the enthusiasm.*

Meanwhile the race to monetise telocytes is on, with Popescu's team at the Victor Babeş Institute regenerating damaged hearts with telocyte transplants! [transplants actually performed in Shanghai on account of pesky ethics restrictions].

"But what about the Keats-and-Chapman story?" Another Kiwi waxed indignantly. "You can't just finish here without a punchline!"

"Relax," I shrugged. "Lie back and think of N-gland."

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* Frontiers appear to be repositioning themselves from the Frontiers to the fringe. Perhaps they are trying to fill the yawning lacuna created when Medical Hypotheses sold out to the The Man and turned all staid and boring (Elsevier hoofed out the old editor and instigated a new policy of having potential papers "reviewed" by "peers" to exclude the more egregious submissions, with a net loss to the gaiety of nations).