There are already people working on decentralized insulin production, quick google search brought me to this: https://openinsulin.org/

So, thermocouples are commonly used in industry to make temperature probes, typically in the form of a coil of wire containing two conductors of different metals. I wonder if it'd be possible to get ahold of some thermocouple wire and put together a solar cell at home?

I'm not sure it totally fits, but Always Coming Home by Ursula K LeGuin was an amazing read. The premise is that an ethnographer of the future is writing about a future, post climate change California people called the Kesh. Most of the book is actually stories the Kesh themselves tell, be it poetry, folk tales, an autobiography, and even a snippet from a novel.

It's an absolutely transformative book that I can't recommend it enough. It's like nothing else I've ever read.