I feel like you could get a lot more quality of life improvement for more people with the money if you spent it on low tech solutions, eg more efficient cooking stoves for people still cooking with biomass, or solar microgrids for areas without electricity.
Solar doesn't need a lot of land. If we used all the land we currently use to grow biofuels for solar instead we'd be able to cover most of our energy needs already.
I just recall how massively supply chains were disrupted by a few percent of the population having a very bad cough a couple of years ago and extrapolate to a situation where billions are dead, agriculture is fucked for years or decades and major infrastructure is destroyed.
Any high technology has incredibly long dependency chains. I think you seriously underestimate the difficulty of bootstrapping, say, WW2 level tech from irradiated wastelands after major nuclear exchanges.
It will just take at least three or four generations to get back to 90's climate, provided we don't trigger any irreversible tipping points, like the melting of the permafrost, in which case the climate is messed up for millennia.
War definitely can end technological civilization. Bootstrapping it again will be quite difficult as a lot of the easily accessible natural resources are already depleted.
Lab-grown meat seems completely unrelated to synthetic biology. For lab grown meat the problem to my knowledge is that it is very expensive to grow vertebrate cells in the absence of an immune system because every contamination kills the batch.
You get funding for such a study the same way you get funding for anything else: first you run cheap small studies, perhaps in mice, perhaps observational, that show an interesting effect and motivate why you need money to run a proper clinical study.
Imagine the number of citations you could get for a solid double blind study that showed homeopathy to beat placebo. The only better impact I could imagine would be showing that climate change doesn’t actually exist.
They are selecting for people who are fine working in their free time. If you contribute to open source you are more likely to contribute to the company on weekends. If instead you have other hobbies or a family that takes up non-work hours you are more likely to drop your pen after forty hours.