Studying rare historical accidents of evolution that resulted in pandemics to see how they took place is one thing, but creating hundreds of such accidents of e

Studying rare historical accidents of evolution that resulted in pandemics to see how they took place is one thing, but creating hundreds of such accidents of evolution deliberately to see how many novel deadly pathogens one can create is quite another. In the case of HIV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234451/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234451/ Now, should we start taking all the viruses known to infect every species of squirrel, rat, monkey, gorilla and chimpanzee and start splicing in motifs that bind, say, the top 100 most common human cell-surface receptors in order to see what's the most dangerous virus - with the optimal mix of mortality and transmissibility (R factor) - we can create, the one best able to cause a global human pandemic? That's insane, and there's no justification for it.