The past is shrouded in mystery.

To understand it, you have to get up close.

Something happened to a collective psychic after the atom bomb.

An NPR's through line, we reopen stories from the past to find clues to the present.

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What's good, y'all, you're listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

I'm Gene Demby.

On this episode, race science is embedded in our medical system.

So what do we do about it?

Okay, so let's say you're thinking about

getting a new piercing, right?

Septum, a new earring, maybe someplace more ouchy, maybe?

And you go to the place and you get a little stab through your skin

with some metal, such are the wages of being fly.

And you got your dope new piercing, and it's shiny,

and you're getting compliments on it, all that good stuff.

And then some time passes and, oh no, you got a scar. So most people people when you get like a small cut it just

heels right back up and you know several months later you can't even tell that you

had a cut there but the scar is raised and maybe a little painful and now you got to take your new piercing out to deal with it.

Other people, when they get a small cut or a puncture wound or vaccination, get this really exuberant scar that forms and that's called

a keloid. That voice you're hearing by the way it belongs to Andrea dayrup.

Andrea is a medical professor or more specifically the course director for pathology at Duke University School of Medicine.

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