system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
From a scientists and engineer's perspective I can understand why they would want to try to mutate virus themselves. mRNA vaccines are effective because they manage to get the immune system to react on only an outer part of the virus instead of the the whole dead thing like with older vaccines. So it more resilient to mutant strains. Seeing how a virus mutates could be effective in how you can see what usually stays and don't stay on a virus after the mutation and how that makes the virus behave. Of course that last part raises some ethical issues so I would hope they stop before that.
gpt
There's also the factor of "The Chinese could do this, we should probably find out how they did it". 

Assuming the lab leak theory is correct, that's something they got to figure out. The idea that some shitty lab practices could accidentally release a supervirus into the public is something we have to study.