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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Rising water temperatures and increasing ocean acidity can kill coral reefs. But a new study finds that dead reefs can potentially recover from catastrophes if ocean temperatures stabilize. Some scientists say the resiliency of coral reef may be the key to their survival. -
The amount of radiation found in Pacific bluefin tuna spawned near Fukushima does not threaten our health, despite today's suggestive headlines. What a new study shows is that scientists can rely on tiny amounts of radiation to track animals across great distances. -
While carbon dioxide streams into the atmosphere from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world, one man is building a machine to suck it back out. And some heavy-hitting investors are betting that it's going to work. -
While carbon dioxide streams into the atmosphere from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world, one man is building a machine to suck it back out. And some heavy-hitting investors are betting that it's going to work.
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The Arctic is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the Earth, and sea ice is rapidly disappearing during the summer months. Some studies now suggest the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice in the summertime by the year 2030, with major repercussions in the region and beyond. -
Dark, finger-like features that appear and extend down some Martian slopes during the warmest months of the year on Mars may show activity of salty water there. They fade in winter, then recur the next spring. The observations are tantalizing but tentative signs that Mars could have conditions necessary to support life.
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Dark, finger-like features that appear and extend down some Martian slopes during the warmest months of the year on Mars may show activity of salty water there. They fade in winter, then recur the next spring. The observations are tantalizing but tentative signs that Mars could have conditions necessary to support life.
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Antarctica is like an amazing frozen layer cake, made from millions of layers of snow that gradually turns to ice. But a new study finds that some ice on the continent is actually forming from water flowing beneath the glaciers — a discovery that upends the way researchers thought about Antarctic ice formation. -
President Obama said Tuesday the U.S. was determined to act on climate change, but did not offer any specific proposals on how the country would do so. His comments came at the opening of the U.N. climate summit.
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A rocket carrying a NASA satellite meant to track global warming has landed in the ocean near Antarctica after a failed launch. The rocket with the Orbiting Carbon Observatory lifted off Tuesday morning from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.
