Downtown Memphis Rotary Club

Memphis was favored last week with a visit from state Attorney General Herb Slatery — who turns out, by the way, to have a brother living here and, in a luncheon address to members of the rotary Club of Memphis, said some appropriately nice things about his host city. In almost every way, in fact, General Slatery was a particularly agreeable visitor. We especially enjoyed his recollection of the “historic” occasion in 2014, when Governor Bill Haslam came to town and swore in, on a single day, “an African American, a Jewish man, and a woman” — to wit, Appellate judges Kenny Freeman and Arnold Goldin, and Supreme Court Justice Holly Kirby.

We appreciate his pride in recounting that moment of diversity and share in it, vicariously. However, if we’d had our druthers, Slatery, who is Tennessee’s preeminent legal officer, would have been more forthcoming about some of the more current issues of inclusiveness.

One of them was highlighted in the form of a question directed to Slatery about an imminent clash between the jurisdictions of state and nation. The issue was a directive — actually, a letter — from the Obama administration offering “guidance” on the matter of whether transgender students should be allowed by schools to use bathroom facilities of their declared (as against their birth) gender. The letter, issued jointly by the Justice Department and the Education Department, declared, in the words of U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, “There is no room in our schools for discrimination of any kind, including discrimination against transgender students on the basis of their sex.”

In all candor, the federal letter, shrouded in several layers of ambiguity, was not exactly a model of clarity and directness. Nor was it terribly forthright about the extent of its legal authority or whether a mandate per se was being proclaimed. There was language to the effect that failure to comply could invite financial sanctions under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Its essential import was clear enough: Transgender Americans should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choice.

As it happens, the aforementioned General Assembly had, in its most recent session, rejected a bill that would explicitly have sanctioned the opposite premise, prohibiting transgenders from exercising such a choice. As it also happens, Slatery himself had contributed to the bill’s withdrawal, in April, by advising legislators that loss of Title IX funding could follow passage of such a measure.

Yet Slatery and, officially, Tennessee have now joined 10 other states in a lawsuit challenging the federal government over the bathroom directive. As the Attorney General said in Memphis last week, “The people of Tennessee should have a voice in [the] process, and we’re having a hard time finding where that voice was.”

For ourselves, we’re having an even harder time finding where the voice of state government is regarding a sensitive matter on which, arguably, it has been on both sides of the issue. Without much optimism, we await further word.

For some decades, the medical world — and those lay people whose destinies brought them in contact with it sadly, apropos potential responses to cancer — has been acquainted with a phenomenon called HeLa cells.

These were malignant cells — used for research and medical experimentation the world over — that derived originally from a single tumor that had belonged to a patient whose name was believed to have been Helen Lane.

The cells were unusually virulent — so much so as to serve so distinct and widespread a purpose. Indeed, they were, and are, regarded as immortal, and by now have been cultivated and dispersed so widely for so many different purposes as to weigh, by informal estimate, the equivalent of 150 Empire State Buildings.

So far the story is interesting, even uniquely so. But it gets more so, in numerous ways. In 2010, an author/researcher named Rebecca Skloot published a book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, that transformed the way in which both the ubiqutous HeLa cells and the supposed “Helen Lane” herself were regarded.

Skloot was in Memphis this week as the featured speaker of the Memphis Rotary Club’s regular Tuesday luncheon — which this week was also a climactic focus of a “big club” national Rotary conference for which the Memphis club served as host. The conference began Sunday night at The Peabody with a spirited keynote address to the attendees by Dick Enberg, the well-known sports broadcaster.

Skloot, though, was the piece de resistance. Reminding those attendees who had read her book and explaining to those who hadn’t, she noted the first basic fact — that the soap-opera-sounding “Helen Lane” was a figment of some researcher’s imagination. The actual — unintentional — donor of the HeLa cells was one Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman from an impoverished family in Maryland who developed cervical cancer and was admitted to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore as a charity patient.

The dime-sized tumor that was extracted from Lacks was a godsend to medicine. HeLa cells were vital not only in cancer research but in numerous other medical breakthroughs, including the development of early polio vaccines. But as Skloot documents, the saga of Henrietta Lacks (who died within six months of initial treatment) had analogues to more sordid medical researches — like that of the African-American syphilis patients in Tuskegee, Alabama, some of whom were purposely infected with syphilis, and all of whom were allowed to die without treatment while the progress of their disease was tracked.

Nothing that graphic happened in the case of Henrietta Lacks. Nor did such malpractive affect the members of her family, who subsequently also become medical subjects. Eventually — thanks in part to the efforts of Skloot, who now runs a foundation to benefit unwitting former subjects of medical experimentation — a protocol has been accepted in medical circles that expands the rights of such patients and has firmed up the concept of patient consent.

But ethical questions remain, and, considering the astounding number of ways in which medical samples are routinely collected from all of us, it remains true, as Skloot reminded the Rotarian conferees, that “in some way, everyone is a potential Henrietta Lacks.”