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.
-
David Wineland, a physicist at a federal lab in Boulder, Colo., was recognized for cutting-edge work in quantum computing that's both incredibly esoteric and practical. He'll share the prize with his friend and friendly competitor, Serge Haroche, who is at the College de France in Paris. -
A huge, magnitude-8.7 earthquake in April produced stronger ground shaking than any earthquake ever recorded, and surprised seismologists by triggering more than a dozen moderate earthquakes around the world. One seismologist thinks we're witnessing the gradual evolution of a new boundary between tectonic plates. -
Rising water temperatures and increasing ocean acidity can kill coral reefs. But a new study finds that dead reefs can potentially recover from catastrophes if ocean temperatures stabilize. Some scientists say the resiliency of coral reef may be the key to their survival. -
Scientists in Switzerland unveiled the results in their search for a subatomic particle that is believed to be key to the formation of stars, planets and eventually life after the Big Bang. Many questions remain about the exact nature of this particle.
-
Royal Dutch Shell could drill several exploratory oil wells into the waters off the north shore of Alaska this summer. The potential prize is huge, but so is the risk, should there be an oil spill in the pristine and remote region. So Shell is recruiting locals and training them to confront oil in icy waters. -
The amount of radiation found in Pacific bluefin tuna spawned near Fukushima does not threaten our health, despite today's suggestive headlines. What a new study shows is that scientists can rely on tiny amounts of radiation to track animals across great distances. -
After years of trying, Russian scientists say they have drilled into an Antarctic lake that is buried beneath more than two miles of ice. They are looking for signs of life that haven't been exposed to sky in 20 million years.
-
More than 100 million years from now, the Americas and Asia might fuse together, squishing the Arctic Ocean shut in the process. That's according to a new model that predicts where the next supercontinent may form. But don't worry: Humans will likely be long gone by then. -
Frustrated by what some see as U.S. foot-dragging on climate policy, an American college student interrupted U.S. envoy Todd Stern Thursday during his remarks at the climate conference in South Africa. Later, Stern emphasized that the U.S. has been working hard to advance global climate policy into the 21st century. -
Thursday in Pittsburgh, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appeared to shift his position on climate change. Speaking at the Consol Energy Center, he said, "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet." In his book No Apology and in earlier public appearances, Romney has said that he believes climate change is occurring — and that humans are a contributing factor. At a campaign appearance in New Hampshire back in August, Romney emphasized questions about the extent of the human role. But his remarks in Pittsburgh represent a clear shirt toward a skeptical position on the causes of climate change.
