I went and pulled the original article. The characterization of recklessness is in my opinion unfair here. It's not like these researchers were cooking this up on their kitchen counters:

"All experiments with 1918-related viruses were performed in biosafety level 3 (BSL3) agriculture containment laboratories. In vitro experiments were conducted in Class II biological safety cabinets, and transmission experiments were conducted in HEPA-filtered ferret isolators (Imai et al., 2012). The research program, procedures, occupational health plan, documentation, security, and facilities are reviewed annually by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Responsible Official and at regular intervals by the CDC and the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) as part of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Select Agent Program. More detailed information on biosecurity and biosafety is described in the Supplemental Experimental Procedures."

Also, if you read the discussion, there's this point:

"We found that a 1918-like avian virus exhibited pathogenicity in mice and ferrets higher than that of an authentic avian virus. Moreover, we demonstrated that acquisition of only a few amino acid substitutions can confer respiratory droplet transmission to 1918-like avian influenza viruses in a ferret model, suggesting that the potential exists for a 1918- like pandemic virus to emerge at any time from the avian virus gene pool."

The body of the paper goes through all the details of which specific amino acid changes are needed. This is important information for understanding how these proteins function. What is it about those few amino acid changes that confers droplet transmission? Others can now study the individual proteins and build off this work.

Reference: http://www.cell.com/cell-host-microbe/pdf/S1931-3128(14)0016...