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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The aim is to make clinical trial data available to volunteers and scientists, even if a drug or therapy being tested turns out to be a failure. That could help identify serious side effects. -
The Trump campaign released information about the candidate's health Thursday. It shows normal test results.
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Hillary Clinton's campaign says she's recovering well from her bout of pneumonia and is otherwise in good health. Donald Trump on Thursday appears on the Dr. Oz TV show to talk about his health.
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Hillary Clinton released updated health information on Wednesday following a pneumonia diagnosis. Her doctor says says she is "healthy and fit" to serve as president.
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Questions are being raised after Hillary Clinton left a memorial for Sept. 11 victims due to feeling overheated. Later, her doctor revealed Clinton had been diagnosed with pneumonia last Friday.
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The American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't recommend using the nasal spray flu vaccine. In late August, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded it wasn't up to snuff. -
A genetic test of breast cancer tumors helped identify women whose survival odds would not be greatly improved by chemotherapy. But that test isn't as precise as women and doctors might like. -
A study found that behavioral problems were more common among children of women who took the pain reliever during pregnancy. But interpreting the results isn't as straightforward as you might expect. -
An analysis of pediatric clinical trials found that the results of almost a third of studies that were finished weren't published in medical journals. The lapses raise scientific and ethical concerns. -
Twenty percent of children are picky eaters but most grow out it. Research suggests that picky eating can also be a sign for hypersensitities that can occasionally cause social anxiety and depression.
