It means next to nothing and even the scientist admits that.
As for what a man made precious metal or stone would do to a real market, I suppose diamonds are extremely cheap now since they can be man made, right LOL
There is a big difference between lab diamonds and 'real' diamonds. Lab diamonds are so cheap because they are ugly peaces of matter. You can make jewelleries of them.
I think the lab gold will be aswell, cheap and only for industry because it isn't the real stuff.
So much is wrong with this...
First, to address the lab made diamonds. What you are saying was true at one time, but not today. Early lab made diamonds were only used for industrial processes, as they were flawed and dull. However, now it is possible to produce lab made diamonds that are absolutely flawless. In fact, high end lab made diamonds tend to be higher quality than high end natural diamonds. The only limit is size at the moment. Lab made diamonds over a couple of karats are very difficult to produce, and thus cost too much to be worth it. Still, smaller ones (still big in jewelry terms) are cheaper to buy than naturally occurring diamonds.
http://gemesis.com/Second, you obviously do not understand what gold is in relation to a diamond.
A diamond, along with graphite, fullerenes (nanotubes, buckyballs, nanobuds), lonsdaleite (hexagonal diamond...not the same as normal diamond...it can actually be almost 50% harder than traditional diamond), coal, and many other materials, are all allotropes of Carbon. Carbon is an element.
Gold is also an element. Creating a gold is not the same as creating a diamond. It would be similar to creating carbon (though, creating gold would be much more difficult, and require much more energy). We do not have the technology to create any element in large quantities (outside of what can be produced from nuclear fission), nor can any organism.
As far as we can tell, from physics, basically all of the gold in the universe was created by supermassive stars when they hit the last moment of their life, collapse inward on themselves, and explode in a supernova (or hypernova in some cases). That is why gold, and most heavy elements, tend to be much more rare than lighter ones. The creation of iron starts the chain reaction that leads to supernova, and thus iron, and anything heavier than it, is only produced for a moment. Then the supernova shoots all of it out in every direction, dispersing it through the universe.
So, no, we don't produce gold in a lab, BUT IF WE DID, it would not be "low quality" gold. It would just be gold. Gold is gold is gold. It is an element. Of course, there are many radioactive isotopes of gold, but the most stable has a half life of something like half a year, so it quickly converts back to it's stable form.
