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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Scientists are trying to develop a vaccine to block the euphoria of heroin without interfering with other pain relief. The Trump administration hopes the approach might help with the opioid epidemic. -
A scientist tested his peers' ability to pick which cancer experiments would pan out. They failed more often than not, which doesn't say much for intuition or efficiency in the scientific process. -
About 5 percent of pregnant women infected with Zika in Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories last year had babies with birth defects, says the federal health agency. And the risk isn't over. -
Some states dictate how doctors must treat this life-threatening reaction to infection, and early intervention is helping. But scientific evidence may be changing too rapidly for the rules to keep up. -
A neuroscientist argues that our noses are more powerful than we think. Humans, he says, actually have a great sense of smell. -
A federal task force says the risks of screening outweigh benefits. Many thyroid growths never develop into dangerous cancers, and overdiagnosis can lead people to have unnecessary surgery. -
The hypercompetitive world of biomedical research occasionally drives scientists to cheat. More often, scientists make decisions that undercut their results. That can lead colleagues astray. -
The National Academy of Sciences has toughened up its guidelines to call cutting corners, dubious statistics and not fully sharing research methods "detrimental" to science. -
Most potential new drugs don't work when tested in people. It's a major disappointment and it drives up the cost of developing new drugs. One big reason is the use of animals in medical research. -
The mayor held a brief news conference Friday to deny the allegations. He said the "untrue allegations" were painful to him and his husband, and said the person making the accusations is "troubled."
