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 carrot isn't enough — bring on the stick. A study finds smokers are more likely to quit tobacco if they lose some of their own money after a relapse, than if they get a bonus for quitting the habit.
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It's a deadly combination of infection and inflammation striking more than a million Americans every year. Doctors can treat the symptoms of sepsis, but they still can't treat the underlying problem. -
Renegade cells floating through seawater apparently cause the cancer, scientists say. Though people can't catch it, the malignancy might offer clues to how cancer cells spread in the human body. -
Scientists have published thousands of studies using immortal cell lines, but in many cases the cells in the experiments have been misidentified or contaminated. The problem could be avoided easily.
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Vultures consume toxic bacteria that would sicken or kill humans. Stouter immune systems, colonies of helpful microbes and potent stomach acid may help the carrion eaters gorge with abandon.
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A highly sensitive blood test for Ebola exists, so why isn't it being used to test all returning health workers from West Africa? Because the virus isn't in the blood in the first stages of infection. -
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the man traveled from Liberia and fell ill in Dallas. He is now in strict isolation at a hospital in the city.
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Scientists based their technique on the one used to create the sheep Dolly years ago. These cells might one day be useful in treating all sorts of diseases. -
It sounds like a good idea: anticipating flu's spread by monitoring a region's online searches. But sometimes a sneeze is just a cold. -
As time runs out to put the brakes on global warming, world leaders seem loath to reduce gas emissions, because it's politically hard, says social scientist Clive Hamilton. Instead, he worries, we'll try to engineer the atmosphere — a tech fix that sounds quicker and simpler – but is fraught with risk.
