Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.
The reduction in cost will almost certainly be similar to reduction in cost needed to sequence an individual's genome, which has fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.
The only catch is that we have to spend money to get there.
Another catch is that the nations who underwrite this research will turn millions in investments into trillions in dividends and the stingy or poor will be left in the cold.
Seeing that private enterprise is only good at taking publicly-funded work and patenting it, and that in the absence of public funding nothing ever gets invented, we should be all-in on this.
edit: it's apropos that you mentioned obesity because GLP-1 drugs are the direct, irrefutable, product of spending at government labs.
edit2: specifically, a single government scientist playing around with lizard saliva in the 1970s because he thought it was interesting.