[daveguy]

The articles you cite start with experimental data about Gene regulatory networks (eg from dna microarray) and then use rnn to characterize or produce the networks known or elucidated experimentally.

None of the sources claim functional equivalence of the GRN by the RNN or vice versa.

From a "big O" computational complexity perspective the gap between what you are describing and the actual case is the gap between P and NP. Just because we can confirm the results of a GRN with an RNN doesn't mean we can produce those results.

Yes, biological computing could harness very powerful parallelism. We are nowhere close to harnessing that power. (See toy manufacturing analogy)