Researchers at UC San Francisco are already feeling the automatic federal spending cuts expected to take effect today.

UCSF gets more money from the National Institutes of Health than any other public university in the country. 

Some laboratories have already instituted hiring freezes or have delayed launching parts of projects, says UCSF’s Vice Chancellor for Research Keith Yamamoto.

"Scientific research laboratories are in many ways more akin to small businesses than they are some big massive endeavor, and so even a modest cut has an immediate impact," says Yamamoto.

He also says the National Institutes of Health has already trimmed grants by ten to twenty percent.  UCSF may lose nearly $30 million this year. And that could delay discoveries of medical cures, "because when a project is interrupted, it's basically ended," according to Yamamoto.

Yamamoto says at present the university is dipping into reserve funds to support researchers.