Hard for me to trace down this research, however, the following statement from a news article is confusing in that it implies that labs in California are actually engineering highly contagious coronaviruses with increased infectivity?

I’d really like to know how this statement was composed and what research it is referring to.

“In a UCSF lab, scientists found that the L452R mutation alone made the California strain more damaging as well.

||| A coronavirus engineered to have only that mutation was able to infect human lung tissue at least 40% more readily than were circulating variants that lacked the mutation. |||

Compared with those so-called wild-type strains, the engineered virus was more than three times more infectious.”