1) In 2015, an article in NATURE magazine discussed how a bat coronavirus had been engineered in a lab - which stirred up a debate about dangerous "gain of function" research. The researchers had created a chimera virus made up of a surface protein of SHC014 from horseshoe bat in China and the backbone of a SARS virus.
The people who defended this research in the article were: Ralph Baric at UNC and Peter Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance.
https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-1.18787