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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People who use e-cigarettes to quit smoking have milder cravings. The act of vaping provides pleasure, which may contribute to its success as a tobacco-quitting aid, researchers say. -
A study found parachutes were no more effective than backpacks in preventing harm to people jumping from aircraft. The researchers' tongue-in-cheek experiment makes a deeper point about science. -
Researchers have devised a large clinical study to quickly assess whether one doctor's apparently effective treatment for deadly sepsis is a fluke or worthy of widespread use. -
Patients and doctors should have nuanced conversations about the benefits and risks of statins before deciding to start them. The drugs can reduce heart attack odds but also carry some side effects. -
Harvard University researchers probed the way ADHD is assessed by taking advantage of a quirk found in many U.S. school systems that means some kids are a year younger their classmates. -
A full genome sequence costs about $1,000. But Nebula Genomics expects that companies and researchers would defray the cost in exchange for key medical information about the person involved. -
Installment plans and refunds for treatments that don't work are two options getting more attention as ultra-expensive therapies become more common. The financial strains will only grow. -
Two new studies suggest that minimally invasive surgery for early stage cervical cancer patients leads to death and recurring disease more often than standard surgery through a large incision. -
Though widely prescribed in hospital intensive care units to treat hallucinations and other signs of delirium, Haldol and similar drugs are no better than a placebo for such patients, a study finds. -
Sometimes discoveries derived from patients' medical data become the foundation of new profit-making companies. A fledgling industry wants to help patients get a cut of the cash.
