Once again, objects are moral-neutral.
A biological agent isn't evil. A killer-bee isn't evil. A gun isn't evil. Cocaine and heroin are not evil.
Creating clones of dinosaurs isn't evil. Despite all they tried to say in Jurassic Park, the fact remained that the dinosaurs weren't the evil on the island. The evil was the greed of the engineer. Cloning dinosaurs isn't evil. Letting them loose on an unsuspecting population to kill and maim is.
Every thing in creation has potential to be used for evil. Dogs can be turned into killers, nuklear power can be used to vaporize a city, guns can be turned on innocent citizenry, and AI can be created and turned into a slave race. It's all possible.
Mankind is distinguished from the rest of nature because of our ability and desire to adapt our surroundings to ourselves. in that capacity, I don't think that really any purely academic pursuit is evil, misguided or even a slightly bad idea.
And yes, yes, yes, we've all heard it before. Mankind is arrogant, mankind will find an evil use for anything, mankind this, mankind that. Why should we call something arrogance when we are simply fufilling our purpose on the planet? We are most human when we are using our rational minds to create new things. Should we stop wondering and exploring the universe because we are worried what might happen with the technology that is created? That's the sort of thinking that would have kept our ancestors barely more than apes, living in caves naked and capturing food with our bare hands. We've existed by creating more powerful, more useful, and faster things, from the rock to the club to the spear to the bow to the knife to the dagger to the sword to the pistol to the rifle, we increased our ability to hunt and kill game, feeding more people. From nomad farming to irrigation to crop rotation to metal plows to fertilizer to synthetic fertilizers to bug sprays and automatic harvesters we've been able to support MORE people per square acre of farmland than ever before.
We are constantly growing and expanding and increasing our power over and against nature, and i'm not sure I see why that is so wrong.