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We're not talking about the same thing, I guess. I'm not talking about making atoms from scratch (I'll leave that up to Big Bangs and supernovae and the like). I'm talking about taking chemicals (amino acids, etc.) and assembling them into artificial organisms. I'm sure that at first such organisms will be quite rudimentary. However, perhaps we'll figure out a way to encourage a kind of hyper-evolution to take place in the lab, thus producing hardier and more varied sorts of organisms. As for an artificial man, that's for the more distant future.

...molecule-to-man is an assumption and does not address how to create the molecules they are tinkering with.

If you read the article I linked to, you'll note that the lab guys are talking about constructing organisms molecule by molecule. They're not talking about making molecules from scratch. Why would they be? There's no need to do that. Nor was there any need to do that when the Earth was young; there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.

there appears to have been a wide array of molecules of many sorts available in the early soup from which life arose.

sigh....and what (or who) made the soup? Again, my point is...make a manmade molecule or a computer progam that shows how to make a molecule. From....? Perhaps this is why cosmology has struggled sooner and is struggling harder than biology, against an inference of design. Evolutionary biologists are mixing and stirring the primordial soup and hoping to say "A-ha!"...while many cosmologists seem uncomfortable in discussing, scientifically, where the soup came from and why the ingredients have (by chance) proven to have been able to produce such stunning recipes (dna codes).

So just belittle the request for science to build a molecule as being "unnecessary" to prove the point that the simplest building blocks of life as we observe it...are beyond the "design" (that word again) of any known science. Or are molecules ...... too irreducibly complex to create, especially from scientific facts about conditions that pre-date the "soup"?

Oh, and returning to the infinitely large empty playroom we will allow our hypothetical super-intelligent children to exist in while they figure out how to create themselves some building blocks (matter) so they can prove it didn't take an Architect to build the Golden Gate Bridge (or a Chef to make soup)...... that playroom should be without light or the dimension of time. The kids will also have to figure out whether they need light or time and how to create them and in what sequence, along with matter.