APART from the cruel deception, perhaps the most shocking of the revelations in the Alder Hey Hospital scandal of thousands of organs being stripped from the bodies of dead babies without their parents' consent is that often they were taken for no medical purpose.

For if, amid the disclosure of enormity of the horror that went on, the grief and anger of parents might have been allayed by anything, it was the thought that life-saving medical science might benefit. Imagine the anguish of those parents, then, who will agonisingly wonder whether their children's organs were taken to become no more than pointless pathological collectors' items -- at the expense of honesty, decency and any regard for their tragic loss.

And it is all bitterly rubbed in by the disclosure that this scandal is not focused solely on Alder Hey and the seven years when the monstrous Professor Dick van Velzen was stockpiling thousands of organs there and shattering the lives of thousands of families. For it is disclosed that more than 100,000 body parts are stored at hospitals and universities across the country, many kept without relatives' knowledge or full consent.

True, the emotions that this scandal arouse have to be balanced by the realisation that the advancement of medicine and surgical techniques depend heavily of research into human organs. And, indeed, today we report on an East Lancashire mother who, after losing her baby daughter to cot death syndrome, wishes her body had been used for research so that others might be saved.

But no matter what the good intentions, there can be no legitimate excuse for doctors acting wrongly or deceptively to retain organs -- and absolutely none at all for them being taken for no purpose. For, as is rightly stressed today by Oswaldtwistle mother Wendy Bury, whose one-year-old son was one of the Alder Hey victims, we need to know that we can trust our doctors. At Alder Hey and elsewhere that trust was disgracefully betrayed. Now the reputation of an eminent children's hospital lies in ruins and the medical profession may remain damaged for years yet.