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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President Obama said Tuesday the U.S. was determined to act on climate change, but did not offer any specific proposals on how the country would do so. His comments came at the opening of the U.N. climate summit.
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If history is any indication, the new swine flu virus isn't going away anytime soon. The virus is not merely a case of gradual evolution. The big change scientists see with this strain is called a "shift."
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A rocket carrying a NASA satellite meant to track global warming has landed in the ocean near Antarctica after a failed launch. The rocket with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory lifted off Tuesday morning from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
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The US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River had hit a bird and two engines were disabled.
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The first NASA study of astronaut crew safety since the 2003 Columbia disaster was released Tuesday. While scientists found that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent that disaster, they did look into preventing other problems before they could come up.
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President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to adopt an aggressive approach to global warming and the environment. At a news conference Monday in Chicago, Obama will announce his team to deal with the nation's energy and environmental future. The industrial world is looking to the Obama administration to help get other countries to make environmental changes.
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The White House is considering the designation of a new marine reserve in the Northern Mariana Islands, but it may not get the same amount of protection as an area created two years ago near Hawaii. The same could be true for other sites in the Pacific that are also under consideration.
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When Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley challenged the state's 5.6 million residents to reduce their home electricity consumption by 15 percent, NPR's Richard Harris looked at ways his household could better conserve. -
President Bush's new goals to address global warming aren't likely to go over well at international talks opening Thursday in Paris. The president's goals allow U.S. emissions to keep on growing for another 17 years, while most industrial nations are stepping toward lower emissions.
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President Bush outlined a new initiative to address climate change Wednesday, saying the United States should stabilize its emissions by 2025. While that's far less aggressive than many nations and lawmakers had hoped, it marks a change for an administration long opposed to setting limits on emissions.
