Society has far more important things to worry about and we should stop wasting public money pursuing non-violent pornography through the courts

Society has far more important things to worry about, and we should stop wasting public money pursuing non-violent pornography through the courts.. D r Steven Hoefflin of Santa Monica must have an interesting perspective on the human condition. He is the plastic surgeon to the stars, known in the trade as "oc Hollywood". The affidavits were flying around the good doctor's head last week - and far be it from us, on a distant shore, to comment on matters which are no doubt sub judice. This man, whose creative knife has brought us Pamela Anderson's chest and Zsa Zsa Gabor's smile, is now being accused by an angry and ungrateful clientele of behaviour likely to bring the high calling of cosmetic surgery into disrepute. Sylvester Stallone's former girlfriend Angie Everhart, who seems, from the photographs, to be a nice, smiling young woman, went into r Hoefflin's operating theatre to have her breasts reshaped. She had not reckoned, however, that Mr Stallone would be present during the operation.

In a sworn affidavit, an ex-employee of r Hoefflin, one Barbara Maywood, alleges: "After Ms Everhart was anaesthetised, her boyfriend, Sylvester Stallone, proceeded to enter the operating room ... Mr Stallone told r Hoefflin to make her breasts 'big but perky, kinda like a 17-year-old'." With what would seem (from the newspaper photographs) to be exemplary skill, r Hoefflin obliged.It is not clear precisely what angers the stars about r Hoefflin But we can guess. When it is claimed that he merely pretended to alter the shape of Michael Jackson's nose (while in fact leaving his scalpel in its sheath) or when it is averred that the doctor "mocked on Johnson's penis", we sense a faint whiff of self-importance on part of the actors. Yes - no doubt they have individual worries about the exact dimensions and proportions of the doctor's handiwork; but what they really hate about this doctor, surely, is that he does not take them seriously. He sees a clientele which is universally plutocratic, preternaturally vain. Each one of them believes that with a tuck here, and stitch there, they can go on defying Time, until, their rictal gape sown firmly in place, they try to grin and pay their way out of eath itself. In this, of course, they differ from the rest of us only in the size of their bank balances, and the particular list of improbable requirements when they go to see the doctor.I feel a strong affection for r Hoefflin.

If he is hounded out of Tinseltown, I should feel tempted to second him on to some board or body to advise the National Health Service over here.I should certainly like to introduce him to Professor John Harris, ethical consultant to the European Commission and the Sir avid Alliance Professor of Bioethics at Manchester University. Last week Prof Harris claimed that there was a "shortage" of transplant organs in this country. Only days after we learned that a hospital had been ripping out the hearts of "dead" babies without consulting their parents, Prof Harris gave his view that this should become a routine practice. That is to say, that the Government should introduce laws which allow hospital doctors to retrieve "spare parts" from the "dead" without consulting the bereaved relatives. Only individuals who could register strong conscientious objections should be allowed to opt out.

But, as he says, "They" - that is, we - "would have to explain why they wish other people to die rather than have their organs used."Harris of Ethics (a Balliol man) is probably under the impression that his view is deeply virtuous. He is prepared to ask a ward sister in a hospital corridor to confront the parent of a recently dead 12-year-old and tell them they are selfish if they want to bury that child with his heart, liver and kidneys intact.Ethical Harris believes in medicine in the way people used to believe in religion. As well as advocating the all-but compulsory removal of organs from our dead, he said that we should buy organs, such is our "need" to patch up our defective bodies with other people's hearts, kidneys etc. We don't need witch doctors anymore in the West with ethical advisers like Prof Harris. We have medical doctors instead, who are able to persuade themselves, and us, that with a plastic hip or breast here, an artificial valve there, an imported kidney and a baby's heart, we could become as the immortal gods.The hope that we can keep evil, or death, at bay was once the opium peddled to us by religion - "invented," said the poet Philip Larkin, "to pretend we will not die." Now it's medicine's turn to soothe us. Some of you would say that such faith was well-placed, and point to the extraordinary pharmaceutical and surgical advances of this century.