Eli5 Does plasma in blood have any relation to plasma as a state of matter?

Question

I know they aren’t the same thing, but are there any properties or something that connect them?

In: 7

Answer 1

The root word of plasma has a meaning that covers being moldable, a mold, or framework. For instance, cytoplasm is the liquid in a cell which everything in the cell floats in, and plastic means something you can mold. Blood plasma is thus the “stuff” that the rest of the blood floats in.

Physics plasma was named so because a guy named Langmuir wrote a paper on it, and he was reminded of blood plasma when looking at it. He saw in ionized gas “the way blood plasma carries red and white corpuscles and germs.”