Ah, you're right. I'd actually considered that but thought it'd limit you to a single locus of infection; but now I realize that you could use it to culture the virus under laboratory conditions and then collect the second-generation viruses. Isolating them might be tricky, though.

As to people experimenting with the virus in unsafe conditions, though, Wikipedia informs me that that actually happened in the late Seventies, leading to one death but not a large-scale outbreak. So that's a little reassuring.