In January 2017, a story begging to go viral fell onto writers’ laps: We have a new organ called the mesentery, which is a broad, fan-shaped fold that lines the guts. Here at Discoverwe pounced on the story, and so did CNN, the Washington Post, LiveScience, Smithsonian, Vice News Tonight, Jimmy Kimmel and many, many more.
We got it all wrong, and it’s time for us to spill our guts.
In our reporting, one burning question we wanted answered was who, or what, determines when a hunk of tissue “officially” becomes an organ. So we posed the question to J. Calvin Coffey, the Limerick University Hospital researcher who presented evidence in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology to “justify designation of the mesentery as an organ.”
“That’s a fascinating question. I actually don’t know who the final arbiter of that is,” he told us. Intrigued, I set out to find the official, legislative organ of organ designation and fell into a rabbit hole that grew deeper and deeper. For one, there is no legislative body that determines what an organ is, but there probably should be (more on that later). But in my search for this illusory organization, I soon discovered there's so much wrong with the mesentery narrative that developed this week. As a remedy, I’m going to break down all the problems with the following sentence:
Scientists discovered the mesentery, the human body’s 79th organ.
