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This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

This week would mark the 80th birthday of Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., a pioneering cardiovascular surgeon at Johns Hopkins who died in 2015.

To celebrate his trailblazing and door-opening legacy, Professor Lisa Cooper and former Johns Hopkins employee, Stephen Ragsdale, tell Dr. Josh Sharfstein some stories.

Let's listen. This week would mark the 80th

birthday of the groundbreaking cardiac surgeon Dr. Levi Watkins Jr., who worked here at Johns

Hopkins and was part of the first team to implant an automatic defibrillator in a human patient. His accomplishments

led to changes in care for literally millions of patients with heart disease around the world.

But on his birthday, I'm going to be speaking to two people who knew him. And we're not going to be

talking so much about the medical details of his accomplishments, but what he was like as a person.

And I'll start with you first, Dr. Lisa Cooper.

Thanks so much for joining me.

Tell me when you first met Dr. Watkins.

I first met Dr. Watkins when I came to Johns Hopkins to do my fellowship in general internal

medicine in the early 1990s.

And he was already legendary here at that time.

He used to host a welcoming reception for all incoming trainees and new faculty members who were from underrepresented groups in medicine like African Americans.

So I met him at that reception. It was a beautiful laid out place with music, a live

band playing and food and drinks and just a very welcoming atmosphere, lots of jokes being told and things like that.

...