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 studying HIV and Ebola have noticed another virus hitching along for the ride in some blood samples. Now they're trying to figure out whether the lurker helps the body fend off disease.
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By making E. coli dependent on an artificial amino acid, scientists hope to show that engineered organisms can be safer and more useful for industrial processes like drug production.
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Children who live in cities in the Northeast are much more likely to have asthma. But a wider look finds that poor children in the suburbs are at high risk, too.
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It's not just government-sponsored medical research that's dwindled in the last few years in the U.S. Drug firms have curbed their investment, too, especially in early-stage hunts for new drugs.
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It's been tough to design tests because some people object to the idea that a comparison group won't receive the vaccine. But plans are moving ahead.
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A natural compound kills germs that have become resistant to antibiotics, researchers say. If it works in humans, it could help combat diseases like tuberculosis.
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Researchers have developed a powerful method for growing human cells in the laboratory that has led to some unusual findings. Cell tests suggest a malaria drug might work against cervical cancer.
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A line of immortal cells, supposedly from a breast cancer patient, turned out to be from a type of skin cancer. The mix-up wasn't discovered until experiments around the world had been contaminated.
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Can you run a clinical trial without a placebo group? That's one of the questions facing researchers in West Africa.
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A highly sensitive blood test for Ebola exists, so why isn't it being used to test all returning health workers from West Africa? Because the virus isn't in the blood in the first stages of infection.