This is an old word, which comes from jade:

Prions, people are yin and different.

Later, because of repetition, the meaning of this word was gradually abandoned and became an uncommon word. Because "Yue" is chosen as the radical, this radical actually means "meat", so it is generally used to represent the meat of people or animals, and the only combination is "pickled protein", which means "pickled stomach".

Because few people use it, in modern times, many new terms appeared in the translation of western scientific theories, and the representatives were selected from these rare words. Prion is used by some scientists and translators to refer to protein. It comes from the Greek π ρ ο, which means "the most primitive" and "the most important". We can see that "prion" is "meta-meat", which means the most primitive meat.

In fact, there is a more scientific, straightforward and commonly used translation of "protein", which is "protein".

Therefore, "prion" is another name of "protein" today, which is generally not used, but scientists must know it when it is mentioned.

Its only advantage is simplicity. For example, the biological "protein invasion factor" is a small non-immune hydrophobic protein that can infect animals and replicate in host cells. But this name is long and complicated, so we call it "prion".

Simple and clear, easy to remember.

Writing a paper can be refined a lot. Of course, if the paper is mixed with water, the number of words will definitely increase by replacing all "prions" with "protein invasion factor".