They are under a deadline to come up with something-anything useful within a few years

For better or worse, being useful isn't something that's important for academic biology research. If you discover a new biochemical pathway, you get published whether or not the knowledge helps anybody to do something useful.

No one is going to magically publish a working paper in Nature tomorrow where they have succeeded in such an effort overnight. Yet, this is basically what the current system expects.

That's I don't see why someone who would develop something that would work as one of the components of the tool wouldn't get published in Nature.

Our society spends billions to kill a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently.

That's a very naive way to look at things. Killing a few Muslims who MIGHT kill some people violently isn't the only goal of the various wars. As long as you pretend it is things are hard to understand.