Modern biology is maybe able to fully disassemble the simplest living forms - but assembling these microstructures synthetically is still way beyond what our tools can do. It’s same like a microchip where a whole chain of small steps lead to factories and these produced the chips. And we don’t know how the original cell/life factories looked like, we just have the cells that are now self-assembling (they are now both the highly complex factory and the product). We can take a cell and modify the code, but it’s hard to do it from scratch because you would need to skip bilions of steps that lead to these microstructures.
I have been recently thinking what is actually life - could it be a manifestation of a fundamental physical law? And this article had an interesting take: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620001114
“How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life”
I enjoyed this paper on the relationship between entropy and life – lots of overlap with that article:
"Life and its evolution are time-oriented, irreversible phenomena that have produced a steady increase in complexity over billions of years. The second law of thermodynamics is the only fundamental law in physics that distinguishes the past from the future and so this law, and its statistical underpinning, offer the only physical principle that can govern any macroscopic irreversible phenomenon, including life."
I have been recently thinking what is actually life - could it be a manifestation of a fundamental physical law? And this article had an interesting take: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1620001114 “How nonequilibrium thermodynamics speaks to the mystery of life”