the.com/protoplasm
The original buzzword for living goo before biologists admitted cells have way more going on.
means The living substance inside cells — the jelly-like material once thought to be the basic physical basis of all life.
from From Greek 'protos' (first) plus 'plasma' (something molded or formed, from 'plassein,' to mold) — so literally 'first-formed stuff.' The word was coined in the 1800s as biologists peered through microscopes and tried to name the gelatinous contents they saw filling cells, believing they'd found the one basic substance underlying all living things. The term swelled into a near-mystical buzzword in 19th-century science and popular writing — the fundamental 'stuff of life' — before 20th-century cell biology carved it into organelles, cytoplasm, nucleus, and a long list of specific machinery, leaving 'protoplasm' as a quaint catch-all rather than a precise scientific term.
- coined
- 1839, by Jan Purkinje, before organelles were discovered
- status
- obsolete term, replaced by cytoplasm plus everything else inside
- victorian hype
- called the physical basis of life by Thomas Huxley
- reality check
- turned out to be nucleus, organelles, fluid, all lumped together