This is not new news, and a bit of a misnomer as to "create" from "scratch" means you have absolutely no raw material to work with... you can't make something out of nothing ... and admittedly the scientists in your paper had to use sequences of the 20 Amino acids already in existence
The building blocks of proteins are 20 different amino acids that are strung together and folded to make the unique globular shape, stability and function of every protein.
.... making new protein sequences is really no different than making a new virus... most viruses made in the laboratory are Haptens. Yes you can classify them into viruses but that doesn't necessary denote function as in the ability to cause viremia.
It turns out that protein stability is a major problem in biology," said Chaput. "As many as half of the 30,000 genes discovered from the human genome project contain proteins that we really don't know what their structure is or whether or not they would be stable. So for our goal, we wanted to learn more about the evolution of protein folding and stability."
I have already discussed prior complementary DNA (cDNA) being synthesized from a mature mRNA template in the laboratory. I have also discussed earlier how we can inject vectors using retro-viruses into human cells to correct certain errors that lead to detrimental diseases such as SCID, as well as Plasmids into bacteria to synthesize Insulin as opposed to deriving it from bovine or porcine sources. it is the basic simple units of our system... but not " functional life" once they put proteins together in such a way to make a fully functional ant or even a wing of a fly will we turn our head in awe... until then I hope more money will go into research to fix the great ills that plague humanity instead of generation non-functional protein moieties. Just a cure for AIDS for starters... such a shame they hold the "secret of life" yet are brought to their knees with something the measure of a few nanometers....
Thanks for the article anyway!
peace!