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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If a female researcher asks a man if he's in pain, he's less likely to admit it. The effect of gender on study results has been known for years. But it's rarely disclosed or discussed. -
Researchers found children fed formula with whole-milk proteins had no greater risk for developing Type 1 diabetes than those fed formula containing broken-down proteins. -
Federal researchers are collecting blood samples from 1 million Americans as part of an effort called "precision medicine." But some critics worry that the path ahead is expensive and unclear. -
The goal is to customize treatments for cancer and other diseases to a patient's own biology. But something as simple as failing to take care of tissue samples en route to the lab can derail that. -
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into research labs in an effort to collect genetic information on a million people. But some skeptics say the focus should be on humans themselves, not DNA. -
Bacteria engineered with an expanded genetic alphabet can produce novel proteins, which could lead to the development of new drugs. -
New guidelines have lowered the threshold for high blood pressure to 130/80, which makes it even more important to get an accurate reading. Here's how to increase the odds of getting it right. -
An inherited disease called epidermolysis bullosa destroyed the 7-year-old's skin. Scientists grew new skin in the lab without the genetic flaw, and replaced 80 percent of his skin. He is thriving. -
Industry says it costs about $2.7 billion to bring a cancer drug to market. But oncologists who ran the numbers put the average closer to $650 million. Drugs are priced way too high, the doctors say. -
Even after a Harvard team took into account differences in age and weight among ancient specimens and knees today, they found that modern humans tend to have more osteoarthritis.
