“What do you teach?” I am asked when I say that I am a professor at UMass. I teach plant physiology. But the question misses the core of what I do: run a research lab. Few ask me: “What do you research?” or “Why is a college professor doing research?”

I answer these questions here to honor the birthday (June 16th) of the late Barbara McClintock, a great 20th century plant scientist, and to resist the current U.S. administration’s attack on university-based science. McClintock’s pioneering and Nobel Prize-winning research was funded by the U.S. government.

Today, almost every faculty member in a university science department, along with teaching in a classroom, runs a research laboratory. The laboratory gives students, both graduate and undergraduate, the opportunity to ask, and answer, questions about how the world works.

Faculty running research laboratories benefits students, science, and society. Having learned the basics in laboratory classes, a student can then join a professor’s research lab where the outcome of their experiments is unknown. In these labs, students do original research; they work with state-of-the-art materials and test their ideas about the subject at hand. These experiences often inspire a student to undertake a career in science; they always enrich the student’s life, providing a compelling contrast to pouring over books in the library (or over files on-screen).

Students doing research succeed. Undergraduate students often co-author papers with their professors. For example, an undergraduate student recently worked with me on mapping the growth of cells in the plant root. Growing cells in the root reside in two distinct zones: meristem and elongation. Meristem cells grow slowly and divide rapidly; by contrast, elongation cells never divide but grow like gangbusters. My student discovered that the boundary separating the zones moves, first closer to the root tip and then farther away, making a complete circuit in about 90 minutes. We published these observations in the new journal iScience.

Does this discovery matter? Yes. It matters to the plant: the back-and-forth movement reflects cellular operations and requires energy. It matters to us: knowing that the boundary moves enlarges science — our collective knowledge of the world. It matters to society: harvesting food depends on plants growing. I cannot say that knowing about this movement will help breed a plant that, for example, grows better in a drought, but I can say that breeding better plants of any kind benefits powerfully from a knowledge base that is broad and deep.

Indeed, our broad and deep knowledge base has long proved to be a fount of innovation for industry. Companies can ill afford to undertake basic research because the road from discovery to profit is too long and winding. By contrast, companies are swift to recognize and exploit key discoveries.

Alas, our knowledge base is right now being transformed from broad and deep to narrow and shallow: the current U.S. administration seeks to slash the budgets of granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute for Health (NIH), and they have halted the distribution of grants that have already been awarded. The motivation for these policies is vague but the consequences are clear: students will lose the chance to do original research and industry will lose a resource for success more valuable than rare earths.

Beyond contributing to knowledge, university-based research contributes to the local economy. University laboratories like mine are funded by both the university and the federal government. The university maintains the space, utilities, and pays me; the grants pay for research supplies and the salaries of everyone else in the lab. In a grant budget, salaries constitute — by far — the largest item. Grants that I have won over two decades at UMass paid the salaries of three Ph.D. students and 15 postdocs. These scholars work full-time and often come here with their families: one held their marriage ceremony right here at the Civic Center in Florence. Salaries from grants pour into the local economy as payment for housing, food, and other expenses. Last year, the total amount of federal grants awarded to UMass Amherst was a hair less than $300 million, three times the size of the budget for the town of Amherst.

As an academic and supported largely by the federal government, Barbara McClintock looked through her microscope at the chromosomes of maize and worked out how these curious dancing sticks underlie heredity. In doing so, she transformed genetics. Her work exemplifies how university science laboratories advance the fortunes of humanity.

Now you know: I research how plant cells grow. Like my colleagues, I do this work to give students space to do real experiments and to reveal the workings of our world. Let’s keep the nourishing waters of discovery flowing.

Tobias Baskin is a professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.