I was delighted to attend the book launch of "Fragile Lives" by my brilliant constituent, heart surgeon Prof Stephen Westaby, in Oxford recently. This powerful book describes a heart surgeon's stories of life and death on the operating table . Prof Westaby tells how he was a back-street boy from a Scunthorpe council estate, and decided to become a heart surgeon at the age of seven. He was prompted by watching American surgeons performing a hole-in-the-heart operation on television. Just how many lives have been saved by him, since he watched that programme? Countless.