Brooks Moses

"Technical tour de force" is about right IMO - and it's exactly the kind of work we need in order to make substantive progress. What they've done is to take about the most trivial sense of 'created organism' imaginable, and then slog through all the decidedly non-trivial work necessary to make that happen.

I see this as biodesign's "Hello, World." It doesn't do anything useful, and it doesn't yield any useful high-level programming algorithms either. But until you can do "Hello, World," you're really pretty much limited to playing with a pool of closed-source programmes that happen to be knocking around already.

Hello, world!