Oh it's much older than 8 years... here is one such proposal from 2011: https://groups.google.com/g/enzymaticsynthesis/c/6GZT8zFNOfo...

I myself was bitten by a radioactive grad student in 2008 that was obsessed with this idea at the time, and have since learned that almost every major household name lab PI has thought about this in one form or another.