https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_fermentation

“Penicillin?! A poison from fungus that kills living cells?! Haven’t you played the sci fi game The Last of Us?”

Stories are stories, man. Story-logic is biased towards interesting tales. And “discovery from the natural world turned to human aims with great results” is uninteresting because we do amazing things these days.

The thing that they made is more alive than a crystal, which when placed in a suitable solution will grow and reproduce its own structure, but much less alive than even the simplest known living cells.

Its "life" is similar to that of a brain-dead human, whose body is not left to die by a bunch of machines that pump air into its lungs and nutrients through its blood vessels.

The techniques developed to make this pseudo-cell might evolve eventually into techniques able to make a true cell and it is likely that valuable information can be extracted from experiments with it, but it is very unlikely that any of the ancestors of the living beings has ever had even a remote resemblance with this (because it is far too dependent on continuously receiving complex cellular components and nutrients from outside; simplified parasitic living beings could appear only when there already existed sufficiently complex living hosts for the parasites).

Some components of this thing are growing by reproducing themselves, but like I have said, so does any crystal, thus it is difficult to choose a criterion that will distinguish with certainty what is living from what is non-living.

The growth is followed by a kind of division into 2 vesicles, but that happens by a mechanism very different from any living cell. Many inorganic things will split when growing over a certain size, so again it is hard to decide whether this can be called living.

If you can disassemble and reassemble a thing, you can say you understand it. Not perfectly. But understand it. I’d imagine properly understanding rudimentary cellular biology will come with perks.

(Also, does the Holy Grail imply both a boon and a cost? Or is that just Indian Jones.)

Anytime you do something interesting or useful someone accuses you of trying to build the apocalypse.

Or like a grad student didn’t dispose of their work properly and are desperately trying to distract from their scandal.

Replicating eukaryogenesis with synthetic components is something I hope to see in my lifetime.