It's a spectrum. A rock is non-alive, and a human talking to another human is rather alive. A virus is closer to a rock than a cockroach is to a human newborn in terms of life, but a brain dead patient is probably closer to a tree than to a butterfly, and so on.
We have pretty fine understanding of cells, but our materials science and manufacturing technology is not "vastly parallel incremental molecular", but "big precise drastic pure chunk" based compared to cellular manufacturing. Not to mention protein folding and self-assembling biomachines and so on. We're getting there.
We have little or no understanding of the complex protocols that occur within a cell. If we did, our standard manufacturing techniques would be vastly different.
We can modify DNA and RNA in interesting ways, but they are not living. It is not until we put them into an already existing living cell that we can reprogram some characteristics of that cell.