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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In September, the Trump administration said it would ban all flavored e-cigarette products in an effort to reduce the youth vaping epidemic. Since then, there's been no movement toward implementation. -
Infectious disease specialists debate whether it's better to give the strongest antibiotics all at once for drug-resistant germs or save the most innovative medicines for use as a last resort. -
Rapid genome decoding and analysis have made it possible to quickly diagnose some baffling rare diseases that make babies sick. Even when there's no cure, the information can help families cope. -
Given the scope and the mysterious nature of vaping-related illness, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up a specialized command center to coordinate its response. -
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is starting to study lung tissue and chemicals from electronic cigarette vapor to track down the root cause of lung damage caused by vaping.
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Alex Yiu was born a seemingly healthy baby. But by age 2, his muscle control and speech were deteriorating. His baffling condition took a decade to diagnose. The reanalysis of a DNA test was the key. -
Will a genetic test for Type 1 diabetes risk be valuable to parents, despite its shortcomings? Now many parents don't know their kids have this condition until they end up in the hospital. -
With hundreds of unexplained cases of vaping-related illness, and the sharp rise in youth vaping, the Trump administration is acting to crack down on kid-friendly vape flavors. -
Medical and genetic data from more than a million Americans are now in scientific databases. Some programs hoard the data, while others share widely with scientists, hoping to speed medical discovery. -
A project that shares medical information from 500,000 volunteers is driving innovative research around the world. The richness of the database means scientists are motivated to make it even better.
