I come at this more from the (amateur) history of science angle (meaning I am in no way qualified to speak about recent work in this field) so take this with a

I come at this more from the (amateur) history of science angle (meaning I am in no way qualified to speak about recent work in this field) so take this with a grain of salt, but it all seems very much in the vein of Turing's late work "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis". Essentially, one of the first things Turing did when he had regular access to a real computer (and not some lashup being used to break German ciphers) was to use it to simulate how life might arise from ordinary chemical reactions. In other words, Turing himself was using a Turing machine (well, a Ferranti Mk 1 I think, so more of a Von Neuman machine) to simulate what ended up being the path to "super-Turing" models of computation!