The Communist Party had put her on the candidates' list for District 5 of Camaguey province as recognition for her achievements.Between 1989 and last year, when she resigned from the clinic and all her party-related posts, she or her 32-year-old brain surgeon son Dr Roberto Quinones, now in exile in Argentina, carried out around 50 foetal brain transplants on Parkinson's victims.Most were Cubans, but last year, as Mr Castro pushed the hard currency- earning "health tourism" policy, Public Health ministry, tourism and party officials insisted Dr Molina set aside 90 of her 180 beds for dollar- paying foreigners."We had carried out the operations under a strict internationally-agreed protocol, on carefully chosen cases, with tight controls and long-term monitoring of patients before and after," said Dr Molina. In 1989, she organised the founding of Havana's state-backed Inter- national Centre of Neurological Restoration (CIRN) and in 1993 was "elected" to Cuba's party-controlled National Assembly. The health system was one of President Castro's great successes, putting Cuba in the vanguard in several biomedical fields.Pioneering neuro-transplants for paraplegics, quadraplegics and various brain disease victims, Dr Molina carried out Cuba's first transplant of foetal brain tissue for a Parkinson's victim in 1987. In Parkinson's victims, the cells that make dopamine appear to have died.As a young medical student, Dr Molina rejected her chances of a lucrative career abroad and followed the precepts of Castro's revolution, becoming a Communist Party militant and dedicating herself to the idea of free health care for her fellow countrymen.

Dr Molina knew Professor Hitchcock and exchanged research findings with him.The transplant involves removing a tiny amount of brain tissue from a newly-aborted foetus and implanting it through a needle, using the so- called stereotactical method, into the basal ganglia part of the brain, which controls body movement The new tissue is supposed to secrete the chemical dopamine. In Britain, the operations ceased after the country's most prominent researcher in the field, Professor Edward Hitchcock of the University of Birmingham, died in December 1993. "Are we reverting back to Nazi Germany when human beings become less important than the scientific ends?"Transplants of foetal brain cells have been going on for several years, notably in the United States, Sweden, Japan and even Britain, but only on an experimental research basis under strict controls monitored by hospital ethical committees. "But these raise the question: where are the foetuses going to be obtained?" he said. The doctor told her it was `for the betterment of society, to keep the population down'," said Dr Greer, assistant dean at the University of Miami School of Medicine.Dr Greer said there was nothing to link the cases he mentioned directly with the foetal brain transplants carried out in Cuba.

"One 17-year-old was told after waking up that she had not only received an abortion but had had an intrauterine device (IUD) inserted. The money-making aspect also raised the spectre of abortions being encouraged specifically to provide fresh brain tissue, she noted.A Cuban-American doctor in Miami, Pedro Jose Greer, yesterday said that several young Cuban women had told him of abortions carried out on them without their knowledge when they lived in Cuba. Like many Cubans encouraged by Fidel Castro to renounce theirCatholicism after his 1959 revolution, she has returned to her faith and believes abortion, not to mention foetal tampering, is unethical. Second, the Cuban government and Communist Party, desperate for hard currency, wanted to turn the transplants into a "massive" dollar-earning industry for foreigners prepared to pay $15,000 to $20,000 for a foetal transplant, she said.Foetuses up to 12 weeks old were used for Parkinson's victims because foetal brain cells continue to regenerate when transplanted, while those from adults or cadavers do not.The women who had the state-paid abortions were not informed as to what would happen to their foetuses, Dr Molina told the Independent by telephone from her Havana home. Dr Molina, 52, who is known worldwide as a pioneer in experimental transplants of foetal brain tissue, made her decision for two reasons. Cuba's most prominent brain surgeon, Dr Hilda Molina, has quit her clinic, the Communist Party and her parliamentary seat over the transplants of brain tissue from newly-aborted foetuses to dollar-paying foreigners with Parkinson's disease. She is now trying to leave the island, but has been refused exit permission and has been harassed and followed by security agents. At the moment the sap in the trees prevents them from burning so quickly."Meanwhile, in Britain's northern outpost, the Shetland Islands launched a publicity drive yesterday to encourage tourists fed up with the mainland heatwave to spend their holiday in "totally average temperatures" with "cooling onshore breezes"..

The hot weather has made the smouldering peat impossible to extinguish. "Our only real chance of putting it out totally is rain," an officer said."Although we really are crying out for rain to dampen down the peat, summer is not our busiest time," the spokesman added."Our worst scenario is a hot spring, when the trees have no sap in them and undergrowth is still dead. England and Wales are expected to remain hot and sunny but the front would move south, bringing fresher weather and some showers tomorrow.In Derbyshire, fire service chiefs said their crews would welcome any rainfall as this was the brigade's busiest summer since 1976.Officers were struggling to cope with thousands of call-outs, and crews were being issued with high-energy drinks to help them combat heat exhaustion.In the North of Scotland, firefighters have battling since the end of July to control a peat fire six miles north of Inverness. Within a day or so their effect is useless and the situation is back to where we started."In Berkshire, firemen resorted to dropping a 600-litre water-bomb from a helicopter to douse 86 acres of blazing straw near the M4 motorway.Although weather reports for the weekend suggest that some rain is on the way, forecasters say the heatwave is set to continue.A London Weather Centre spokesman said the respite from the scorching temperatures would be brief with high pressure building again by Monday and next week becoming increasingly hot."We seem to be getting these mini-breakdowns, then the weather picks up and it's very warm again," he said.The London Weather Centre said cooler weather with some cloud and rain would arrive over northern and western parts of Britain today. At the moment, fires are spreading extremely quickly."Without a long period of rain to dampen grassy areas, the fire risk will not disappear, the spokesman said."Thunderstorms don't actually solve the problem. "Then, of course, putting the actual fire out also becomes more difficult.

It can cost us a great deal in extra repairs," said a spokesman.Firefighters have also been called out to numerous garden fires ignited by sparks from bonfires.Staffordshire Fire Service answered 709 calls in a 24- hour period earlier this week, and they say the number of grass fires is running at almost three times the average."Because the vegetation in this area is so dry, it burns much more readily," a senior officer said. Staff at KwikSave in Luton, Bedfordshire, discovered Colin Breslin's car with its doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition The money was found to be missing from the store's safe. A police spokesman said it was not yet known what had happened to Mr Breslin, 29, from Barton, near Luton, but officers were pursuing a number of lines of inquiry, including the possibility of kidnap.. Fire services throughout the country are appealing to the public to take extra care following a huge increase in the number of emergency call- outs to grass and forest fires. Vegetation is tinder-dry, and the current hosepipe bans in East Sussex, West Sussex and Cornwall, and pending drought orders in the North-west, Yorkshire and Oxfordshire are likely to exacerbate the situation. Fire officers in Hampshire have had to call in army all- terrain fire pumps in an attempt to cope with the influx of emergencies, currently running three times higher than normal.Six green goddesses - Bedford 4x4 pumps built in the 1950s and deployed during the nine-week fire brigade strike in 1977-78 - will be used to patrol fires on common land which have been putting an "enormous strain" on the county's regular fire rescue vehicles.Officers took the decision to call the vehicles out of their store near Burton-on-Trent to increase the number of call-outs they could attend, and to save their modern pumps from damage."The ground on the commons is so dry that the modern vehicles have to race on to them day in and day out.