Around 1,000 people gathered in Bethesda Saturday to express their frustration and fear over possible cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and research at the National Institutes of Health headquarters.

The National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, has since fired 1,300 employees and cancelled more than $2 billion in federal research grants.

Distrust of science is fueling such misguided proposals as scaling back critical public-health agencies.