Medicine & BodyGreek → English
Cytokine
/ˈsaɪtəkaɪn/noun
A small signalling protein released by cells to direct immune and inflammatory responses.
The Greek roots
κύτος
kýtos
hollow vessel, container
κινεῖν
kineîn
to move, set going
Literally: “cell mover”
The story of the word
Stanley Cohen proposed the term in 1974 to gather up the growing crowd of immune messengers that were each being named separately. Kytos meant a jar or any hollow before biology took it for the cell. Kinein is the piece inside cinema, which started life as kinematograph, a writer of movement. A cytokine storm is that signalling system running away from its own controls.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1974
Same family
cytoplasmleukocytekineticcinema
In a sentence
The bloodwork showed cytokine levels far above anything the infection alone would explain.