In artificial biology, a distinction must be made between 1) genetically modified organisms, which are indeed living organisms, even if they are enslaved, 2) synthetic biology, which is limited to synthetically reconstructing a given genome, which has succeeded in effectively recreating a living bacterium (perhaps a mammoth one day), 3) finally, the project of artificial life, i.e., the creation of a living cell from scratch using a minimal genome, or even bases other than DNA or RNA (such as APN).
We are nowhere near this yet, but what is interesting is that it raises the question of the creation of a new form of life, because we can be fairly sure that this artificial life will have nothing to do with real life. Indeed, life is evolution, whereas artificial life must not evolve, or only marginally, in order to meet our technical requirements. Rather than living organisms, what we would end up producing would be biological machines, possibly programmable. Nothing truly alive, because life cannot be reduced to reproduction or metabolism; it is plasticity, a process of transformation through interaction with its environment. Life without evolution is like intelligence incapable of learning: a contradiction in terms. There is no life cut off from its origins, without a history that it continues (genetic heritage) or without a world that it inhabits and which constitutes it (diachrony and synchrony).