Comment by SilverBirch

Viruses will mutate. And we don’t understand them well enough, so one method to study them is gain of function research - you modify the virus and then you have a lab version you can design against. The risk is you risk releasing a new virus entirely unnecessarily, the benefit is you can study how to combat viruses that don’t yet exist. Imagine the counter example of covid. What if a covid type virus mutates in the wild but we already have a great vaccine sitting on ice ready to go.