If I had any funding to work freely in these subjects, I would instead focus on the more fundamental questions of computationally mapping and reversing cellular senescence, starting with something tiny and trivial (but perhaps not tiny nor trivial enough) like a rotifer. My focus wouldn't be the biologists' "we want to understand this rotifer", "or we want to understand senescence", but more "can we create an exact computational framework to map senescence, a framework which can be extended and applied to other organisms"?
Sadly, funding for science is a lost cause, because even where/when it is available, it comes with all sort of political and ideological chains.