I never said we're at this stage now or even close to it, in fact I explicitly said the opposite:

>>>>Like I said, the technology is very far off from having real world applications like this. At the moment it feels like we're in the analogue of the 40s and 50s for conventional computing. The field is still just inventing the very basic building blocks. It's going to be very limited in use, wildly dangerous(look up mercury delay lines) and unreliable for decades to come

As for comparing creating medicines in a vat to using bacteria as an active treatment, you're the only one making that comparison. The paragraph you responded to wasn't about in vitro drug synthesis at all, so I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, it's obviously different. I never said otherwise. It's perfectly possible to target bacteria to specific tissues; wild bacteria already do this.

My point was that a bacteria engineered to target a malignant tumour, to be very treatable with antibiotics or bacteriophage, and to have a strongly reduced rate of mutation, is extremely unlikely to evolve into a pandemic, and is likely to be much safer than chemotherapy and radiation.