Harris went on to do more work at the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Institute in England. Later, he earned a Ph.D., in addition to a medical degree, both from the University of Pennsylvania. Today, he is world-renowned as an expert on the causes and treatment of deafness and editor of the 1999 publication of "Meniere's Disease." A pioneer in inner ear diseases, he has also authored two other books on oto-immunology and inner ear disorders and currently is involved in several clinical trials on the treatment of autoimmune disease of the inner ear and sudden deafness. One of his research efforts is to develop diagnostic assays that will assist practitioners in determining the etiology of deafness when patients lose their hearing for no apparent cause and to devise new and more effective treatments to reverse deafness.

As professor and chief of the UCSD School of Medicine Division of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, with an active clinical practice and a third of his time spent in research, Harris has been named one of the country's outstanding otolaryngologists by Town and Country and American Health magazines and "The Guide to Top Doctors." He has also made the list of "Best Doctors of America" every year since 1995. Additionally he has served as president of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology, and the American Otological Society, the second oldest medical society in our country.

Today, he says, you have to be more than a practicing physician dabbling in research, or a researcher engaged in clinical work and investigations on the side. It's something he envisioned almost 30 years ago. "When I was in training, everybody around me at the institutions back East were a triple threat," Harris recalled. "These were academicians, very capable investigators who dealt with the most difficult clinical problems. And they were outstanding teachers. So I tried to mirror my academic career on these people." They included his mentor Dr. Harold Schuknecht, former chair of otolaryngology at Harvard University, where Harris served his residency. "He imbued me with the notion of being intellectually honest and basing everything on scholarship and scientific evidence for making medical decisions," said Harris. "You investigate and approach problems the best you can, having the knowledge base that enables you to look at new questions," Harris elaborated. "Science is a building block of new information. You continue to assimilate more facts about a problem and look at it in a new light. Most discoveries are made not as huge leaps but as old questions looked at a new way."

The opportunity not only to do research, but to teach as well as run a practice is what drew Harris to UCSD in 1979, after serving his residency. "I saw an enormous emphasis on the things I felt were important," he said. "So, while I attained the best clinical and research training, I could now bring these aspects of my career together at UCSD, where the emphasis is on the intellectual pursuits in the field and where I'd have enough free time not to be inundated with clinical care. Yet, there's enough to keep me busy clinically," added Harris, who joined UCSD as assistant professor in surgery/otolaryngology and became chief of the department in 1986. After undergoing additional fellowship training at the University of Zurich in 1983 with the foremost skull base surgeon in the world, he returned to UCSD and began offering delicate microsurgery of the inner ear and the skull base to patients in the community.

Research by Harris and his department, which includes seven full-time and five part-time clinicians, seven full-time researchers and 60 support personnel, has focused on a number of projects, ranging from auto-immunity to hearing cell regeneration and stem cell transplant to restore hearing.

Harris, who has brought surgery for complex disorders of the temporal bone and skull base to San Diego, currently is focusing on how the body, particularly the inner ear, responds to inflammation as the result of viruses, bacteria, allergens or forms of autoimmune suppression. "What I've tried to do is elaborate how many of these affect the inner ear and its functions," he said. "There are patients who will suddenly lose hearing for unexplained reasons," he said. "As clinicians, we're unable to determine why. When one ear goes bad, the patient can adjust. Everything is reasonably copasetic until the opposite ear starts losing hearing." What he has found is that a high percentage of these cases had antibodies directed against the inner ear tissue. "With that knowledge we're able to treat these patients with effective immunosuppressive agents and take someone previously going deaf and restore hearing almost back to normal," said Harris.

When Harris earned a combined Ph.D and M.D., the combined degree program was one of the first of its kind in the country. Today, the combination is not so uncommon. Still, such duality is essential, according to Harris, especially as the competition for limited research dollars grows more and more intense. "For a doctor who wants to continue to see patients and teach and be an academic triple threat who also does research, you're up against stiff competition," Harris said. "Proving a hypothesis to the level anyone would be satisfied with requires a very systematic approach that most M.D.s haven't developed at the beginning of their careers. "It gives you a perspective on research that is irreplaceable."