Richard Harris
Award-winning journalist Richard Harris has reported on a wide range of topics in science, medicine and the environment since he joined NPR in 1986. In early 2014, his focus shifted from an emphasis on climate change and the environment to biomedical research.
Harris has traveled to all seven continents for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest, the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis), and Japan to cover the nuclear aftermath of the 2011 tsunami.
In 2010, Harris' reporting revealed that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. That revelation led the federal government to make a more realistic assessment of the extent of the spill.
Harris covered climate change for decades. He reported from the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and including Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.
Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. Those include the American Geophysical Union's 2013 Presidential Citation for Science and Society. He shared the 2009 National Academy of Sciences Communication Award and was a finalist again in 2011. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry. Since 1988, the American Association for the Advancement of Science has honored Harris three times with its science journalism award.
Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues related to the nuclear weapons lab in Livermore. He started his career as an AAAS Mass Media Science Fellow at the now-defunct Washington Star in DC.
Harris is co-founder of the Washington, DC, Area Science Writers Association, and is past president of the National Association of Science Writers. He serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Harris' book Rigor Mortis was published in 2017. The book covers the biomedicine "reproducibility crisis" — many studies can't be reproduced in other labs, often due to lack of rigor, hence the book's title. Rigor Mortis was a finalist for the 2018 National Academy of Sciences/Keck Communication Award.
A California native, Harris returned to the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2012, to give a commencement address at Crown College, where he had given a valedictory address at his own graduation. He earned a bachelor's degree at the school in biology, with highest honors.
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A Canadian study suggests that fluoride consumed by pregnant women can affect the IQ of their children. No single study provides definitive answers, but the findings will no doubt stir debate. -
The proportion of people who say they have a "great deal" of confidence in scientists to act in the public interest increased from 21% in 2016 to 35% in 2019, according to the Pew Research Center. -
Sepsis, the body's overreaction to infection, strikes more than a million Americans a year and kills more than 250,000. Evidence suggests that regulations can improve its diagnosis and patient care. -
Traditional blood tests still do a better job flagging common inherited diseases. Gene sequencing can be useful for detecting some conditions, but the results can be difficult to interpret. -
It turns out you aren't simply a clone of cells from the womb. Over a lifetime, mutations create a patchwork of tissues made with pieces that have subtly different genetic signatures. -
Regulators give many cancer drugs a fast track to market while requiring drugmakers to do more studies after approval. Researchers have found the follow-up studies frequently come up short. -
The nonprofit Allen Institute in Seattle has produced a visualization of human cell division that promises to be useful for professional scientists and curious amateurs alike.
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New cases of asthma dropped dramatically in Los Angeles communities where air quality improved the most over 20 years. The results illustrate health benefits from pollution control. -
More than 600 people will take part in study to test a promising treatment for Huntington's disease, a fatal inherited condition. The experimental drug interferes with defective genetic machinery. -
Ethical concerns aside, the genetic ingredients for human traits are so complex that editing a few embryonic genes is unlikely to have much effect — or achieve the fantasy of enhancing humans.
