The artificial-cell experiment was pretty interesting. It demonstrated that epigenetic information is not necessary for a viable cell.

More than that, though, it's a "hello, world" — although the cell itself didn't do anything useful, now we have the compiler working, albeit expensively. Now we can do experiments like the following:

- removing introns entirely to see if that damages viability;

- inserting the gene you want at a specific place in the bacterial genome instead of splicing it in at some random place.

Basically, it's a "control group" for a much more precise set of experiments than we've been able to do in the past. It's easy to take the ability to do "hello, world" for granted as a programmer.