Yep, Alchemy is the art of turning non precious metals like iron and nickel into gold, silver, and/or platinum. An art yet to be perfected, but in the working for thousands of years. I guess the article probably should have been titled something more along the lines of "Toxic chemical that apparently everyone already knew was known to contain gold, but no one has ever heard of can now become of use to humans due to a lab created bacteria."
Of course the chemical still needs to be mined out of nature by somebody (unless these idiots choose to synthesize a whole heap of toxic crap for everyone), just like gold has to be mined (usually by barefoot slaves), so i don't see what good will ever come of what these dudes did here....