A protocell is a simple chemical agent. It is based on the chemistry of oil and water. That's the system that I work with. You can think of it more generally as like a primordial agent. It's a complex primordial agent, a very simple container as it were, that has a set of properties that are manipulable. They are programmable. We can alter them. So because these protocells are inherently complex we can design them to have different effects.
