About Amy Harmon
Amy Harmon is a national correspondent for the New York Times, covering the impact of science and technology on American life. She won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for her series, “The DNA Age,’’ which examined DNA tests that reveal more than we are sometimes prepared to learn about who we are, where we came from and what might be in store for us in the future.
Ms. Harmon is interested in all the ways science and technology shape how we live
For a current reporting project, she is interviewing cancer patients seeking out experimental drugs. Recently she wrote about a high school teacher in Florida trying to teach evolution to students raised to believe the Bible’s creation story is fact and how webcams are changing relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Previously, she has written about audiobooks and Asperger’s syndrome, the genetic children of sperm donors and online bullying.
Ms. Harmon’s career began at The Michigan Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Michigan, where she earned a B.A. in American culture in 1990. In her first real job, as a researcher in the Detroit bureau of The Los Angeles Times, she ordered fax paper and wrote about the deteriorating U.S. auto industry. In 1993, Ms. Harmon transferred to the paper’s newsroom in Los Angeles, where she parlayed an incredible skill she had learned in college —sending and receiving e-mail — into a beat on the rise of the Internet as a social and business phenomenon.
Ms. Harmon joined The New York Times in 1997 and continued to cover the social impact of digital technology. Her story about two Internet entrepreneurs, one white and one black, was part of a series on race relations for which The Times won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize. It was her first experience with long-form narrative writing, which she persists in attempting even though she is told Web readers can’t bear to read more than three paragraphs, max. One of those tomes,“Facing Life with a Lethal Gene,’’ is included in “The Best American Science Writing 2008,’’ published by Perennial/HarperCollins.