“For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.”
This is the actual line between chemistry and biology, crossed in a lab with parts nobody found alive to begin with. No stem cells, no borrowed genome, just molecules assembled from a parts list until they started copying themselves. That’s a bigger deal than most of the synthetic-biology press releases that get this headline, because it wasn’t edited or rewired. It was built.