Dr. Uche Blackstock always knew she wanted to be a doctor, following in the footsteps of her mother.

Not only was she amazing, but I wish she could have given herself a little bit of grace.

I wish the road could have been easier for her.

It's Monday, February 12th, and welcome back from the weekend. It's still Science Friday.

I'm sci-fi producer Shishana Buxbaum. Uche and her twin sister, Oni, would often visit their mother at work, seeing her in action taking care of patients, and they love to play with their mother's doctors back.

And leader, Uche and Onee became the first black mother-daughter legacies to graduate from

Harvard Medical School. In her new book, Dr. Blackstock reflects on this legacy and grapples

with the long history of racism in American medicine. Here's sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis with that conversation.

Dr. Uche Blackstock is an emergency physician, founder and CEO of advancing health equity,

and author of Legacy, a black physician reckons with racism and medicine. She is based in

Brooklyn, New York. Dr. Blackstock, welcome back to Science Friday.

Kathleen, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to me back. Thank you so much for being here.

You write so lovingly about your mother. Tell me more about what you learned about medicine from her.

Well, I refer to her as the original Dr. Blackstock. I had a very

unusual childhood in that my mother was a black woman and that she was a physician, but she also

really left a huge impact on both my twin sister and me. She grew up here in Central Brooklyn,

where I live, but under very different circumstances.

She was born to a single mom. My mom also had about, I had other siblings and was raised on public

assistance. So she had a really, really difficult life. But with, you know, some fortune,

determination, strong work ethics, she ended up being the first person in her family to graduate from

college, attended Brooklyn College, had a chemistry professor there who encouraged her to apply to

medical school, and she ended up at Harvard Med. And she could have gone anywhere after that,

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