If you can get past the paywall you can read some of my thoughts on research funding in an article published on March 8 in the Times Higher Education Supplement .

If not, here is a “fair use” excerpt:

Mathematicians have been reluctant to recognise that if our work interests generous donors, it is often precisely because it is “useful” according to a definition that Hardy proposed near the beginning of the First World War: “its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life”.

We will have to overcome this reluctance and draw uncomfortable conclusions. Wherever you turn as a mathematician, you’re going to be someone’s kidney: practically every potential source of research funds is tainted in some way.

(I’m afraid you’ll have to find a way to read the article if you want to know what that kidney is doing in that last paragraph.)