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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First Lady Melania Trump underwent an operation Monday at a military hospital just outside of Washington, D.C. Her office said it was to treat a benign kidney condition.
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A spokeswoman for the first lady says she will be hospitalized all week after undergoing a surgical procedure to treat a kidney condition. President Trump tweeted that his wife "is in good spirits." -
Two big studies aim to rigorously test what could be a revolutionary treatment for a common and deadly disease: sepsis. Many doctors are awaiting the results before changing their practice. -
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital say 11 surgeons were involved in the 14-hour surgery in March. The patient, who requested anonymity, is expected to be released from the hospital this week -
Research finds that more than two-thirds of lung cancer patients who received Keytruda plus chemotherapy would be alive a year later, compared with about half of people who only got chemotherapy. -
Carolina Reapers are some of the hottest peppers in the world. So hot, in fact, that for one man, participating in a pepper-eating contestant resulted in a painful, serious "thunderclap headache." -
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's efforts to control drug-resistant bacteria finds that the percentage of bacteria carrying this resistance is declining. But it wants more data. -
Researchers looked at states with medical marijuana dispensaries and those that allow home cultivation. They found lower use of opioids, when compared with states where marijuana remains illegal. -
Scientists are trying to develop drugs to counteract an "undruggable" genetic variant that's responsible for about 30 percent of all cancer cases. It's high risk — high reward research. -
How low should blood sugar go? A major medical society recommends less aggressive treatment for Type 2 diabetes. This controversial position goes against advice from numerous other groups.
