it's still a stupid argument because the brain itself is a chinese room. forget cells or atoms, none of your neurons or synapses understand chinese.
And yet some people seem to understand Chinese just fine. How can you explain that gap? It's only a stupid argument if you first assume that functionalism is true.
The argument is supposed/or often used to disqualify machines from consciousness but it's stupid because biological neurons don't understand the bigger picture anymore than an artificial neuron sampled from a model.