He has codified the central concepts of this nascent area of knowledge into a set of operational rules termed the 'Laws of Biomimetics'.
As part of this work, Goldstein has published a set of guidelines specifically designed to identify the artificial life forms likely to emerge from research at the intersection of nanotechnology and biotechnology.
Given that, a life form will be considered an animat (living material) if all the information necessary to execute that minimum set of physical and chemical operations cannot be stored in DNA or RNA.
The corollary: If all the information necessary to execute that minimum set of physical and chemical operations can be stored in DNA or RNA, the life form is biological.
He was probably the first person to use the term "Breaking The Carbon Barrier" to identify the future moment when humanity successfully engineers the first nonbiological life form.