Health expert calls Trump's medical research cuts "reckless destruction"

The National Institutes of Health is the world's largest source of funding for medical research. It has also undergone huge budget cuts in recent weeks imposed by the Trump administration, which prompts thoughts from Dr. Timothy Johnson, long-time ABC News medical editor and founding editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter:

Over the course of my long career in medical journalism, I had the great privilege of getting to know many of the leading medical researchers in this country. They were typically people of great integrity who had dedicated themselves to the often-frustrating and tedious task of painstaking research to find new cures and preventions for important medical problems. And the bottom line for many of them was that, without government support, they could never have achieved the discoveries that have helped us all.