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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A carrot isn't enough — bring on the stick. A study finds smokers are more likely to quit tobacco if they lose some of their own money after a relapse, than if they get a bonus for quitting the habit.
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The outcomes of many medical procedures and treatments done in hospitals nationwide aren't tracked or even measured, says a surgeon who thinks that's bad. Understanding outcomes, he says, saves lives.
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Genetic profiling of cancer cells can help guide treatment, but such profiles can be ambiguous. Results would be more accurate if all labs tested normal cells from each patient, too.
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Does the imbalance start at conception or are there factors during pregnancy that favor the birth of slightly more males than females? Researchers find clues that point to factors in the womb.
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Medical researchers have made only modest progress treating the most common cancers since the war on cancer was declared in 1971. The disease has proved far more complicated than doctors had hoped.
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When you dig into the number on cancer, the results are mixed. Overall, deaths are up. But survival five years after diagnosis has improved for many forms of the disease, including breast cancer.
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Federal law requires publicly funded medical researchers to promptly report the results of many experimental treatments. But few are doing so, a review shows, and patients may be hurt.
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Tobacco's link to lung cancer, stroke and heart attack is well-known. But smokers are also more likely to die from kidney failure, infections and breast cancer, a revised tally suggests.
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Scientists launched a large trial Monday to test two vaccines. But testing Ebola drugs in West Africa is proving more difficult than expected because the disease is disappearing rapidly.
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Doctors and scientists could could learn a lot more about diseases if the were able to to tap into a wide spectrum of information about people who get sick and those who stay healthy.