I'm so glad there are people doing what you do. You make the future possible. You make science fiction into science-reality. I imagine your job depends on funding from outside places, and I also imagine there are people who'd want to cut that funding because they don't understand what you do. I read your explanation and I STILL don't quite understand what the results are, but I do know that this is a step toward developing new materials and products. Good stuff.
I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher, so I'm directly funded out of money from my boss, which comes from the US Government (the Department of Energy). Money is most definitely a problem for academic research at the moment in almost any subject (the humanities have had almost non-existent funding for years in the UK) and is one of the reasons I moved countries after my PhD. I don't like arguing for science funding on purely economic grounds (I think it says something very sad about society that one often has to make such arguments to politicians), but whilst there is some debate about quite how good funding science is for the economy as a whole (see, for example, this Nature piece and articles therein), there is a definite consensus that it is good. Probably I'm biased (as a scientist), but I can't help but think scientific inquisitiveness is as much a defining feature of humanity as its pursuit of the arts, exploration, poetry, theatre, literature, etc. Eh, hopefully I don't sound too pretentious!