What was going on when I was born?

A site manager at the New York Exposition and Convention Center and two electrical contractors who work elsewhere were indicted yesterday on charges of offering a $100,000 bribe to be named developers of a $32 million shopping and office center on Staten Island. According to the indictments, the three men offered to bribe an official of the city's Public Development Corporation and paid $30,000 to a detective masquerading as an official. ''They were looking for an inside track,'' District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau of Manhattan said at a news conference in his office. Investigation Commissioner Patrick W. McGinley said the arrests followed an eight-month undercover operation.

A new era in the treatment of kidney disease is fast approaching, according to experts at a National Kidney Foundation symposium that began here today. By using advanced, highly sophisticated diagnostic tools, doctors are learning that some forms of the disease, which last year killed 78,000 Americans, are less harmful than once believed and that others are considerably more destructive. The doctors have begun to formulate new classifications of kidney disease that have already led to some changes in drug therapies. Preliminary results indicate that these new therapies could be more effective in the early stages of some forms of the disease than the old treatments have been, according to researchers who spoke at the symposium and reports in medical journals. A key to the progress has been the use of advanced electron microscopes in conjunction with new immunologic tests done in laboratories. The doctors are using the electron microscopes to take pictures of tiny pieces of kidney tissue removed with a long, thin biopsy needle, and then correlating information derived from those pictures with the results of the immunological tests done on that tissue.

The Supreme Court upheld the antitrust settlement under which A.T.&T. agreed to divest itself of its local operating companies. The vote was 6 to 3, with the dissenters arguing that the Court should not have ruled in the case without a full briefing. (Page D1.) A.T.&T. plans to raise $1 billion through a new offering of common stock. It will be the company's second huge offering since December. (D1.) The steelworkers' union and seven major companies agreed on a new contract containing significant wage and cost-of-living concessions. The pact was submitted to 250 presidents of union locals. (A1.)

A New York State Supreme Court justice was publicly reprimanded yesterday by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct for referring twice to an attorney appearing before him as ''little girl.'' The justice, Anthony T. Jordan Jr., made his references to Martha Copleman of East Brooklyn Legal Services in a civil case in Brooklyn on Dec. 7, 1981. According to the commission, Miss Copleman sought an adjournment in a case involving a woman who had been denied welfare.

RESEARCHERS in the rapidly growing field of industrial biotechnology have developed a strategy for making safe and potent pesticides, using chemicals harmless to man and all other vertebrates. The chemicals are converted into deadly poison by enzymes present only in insects. The new insecticide strategy is just one of many advances in basic research that promise to be directly useful in agriculture and plant sciences. They are all products of biotechnology, the application of basic research in biology to practical problems ranging from drug manufacture to industrial chemistry. The potential agricultural applications have only recently begun to emerge, but they include developing techniques that could lead to new breeds of more nutritious, more productive, disease-resistant plants or species that could survive in harsher environments or need less chemical fertilizer to grow. The experimental insecticide, developed by Glenn D. Prestwich, Apurba K. Gayen, Seloka Phirwa and Toni B. Kline, researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, uses plant products called phytosterols, which are chemically related to the steroids that are important to humans in such forms as vitamin D, sex hormones and drugs of the cortisone type. They added fluorine to the substances to produce compounds called 29-fluorophytosterols.

The Security Pacific Corporation has agreed to acquire two commercial lending subsidiaries of the Walter E. Heller International Corporation for $400 million, plus an undetermined portion of future earnings, the two companies announced today. The takeover would end Heller's role as a major competitor in the commercial finance business. Its main remaining operation would be the American National Bank and Trust Company, which has $3.3 billion in assets and is the fifth-largest bank in Chicago. The agreement calls for Security Pacific, parent of the nation's 10th-largest bank, with assets of $37 billion, to acquire Walter E. Heller & Company and the Walter E. Heller Overseas Corporation, which have combined assets of more than $3 billion. Security Pacific's existing commercial finance unit, Security Pacific Business Credit, has about $500 million in assets.

President Reagan is considering an increase in the number of United States military advisers in El Salvador beyond the current limit of 55, a senior White House official said today. The official, who met reporters aboard Air Force One as Mr. Reagan flew to California, said no decision had been made. He said an increase was under consideration as part of an overall review of policy in Central America. The disclosure came hours after President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz voiced anxiety to Congressional officials about what they called the declining situation in El Salvador. Mr. Reagan told a bipartisan Congressional group at the White House that El Salvador ''faces a difficult situation'' because of ''arms supplies coming into the guerrillas.''

WHEN Jon Harkness was offered a chance to give up teaching and become a curriculum supervisor, he accepted only on the condition that he could continue to spend half his time in the classroom. Now, he teaches two physics classes and helps coordinate the entire science program for the public schools of Wausau, Wis. If there were such a title as ''master teacher,'' Mr. Harkness would have it. There is growing interest across the country in creating a category of professionals in elementary and secondary schools known as master teachers. The designation is seen by educators as a device for conferring recognition and status, and possibly higher pay, on the nation's leading teachers.

At the Original Coney Island in downtown St. Paul, Frances Arvanitas, a native of Greece, is in her 54th year of serving hot dogs to a neighborhood that once teemed with European ethnic families but is now home to bands of native, but homeless, poor. On the plains of northern Colorado, Anthony T. Tu, a biochemistry professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, is one of a growing number of Chinese-born scientists who have risen to prominence in this country in recent years. The span between Mrs. Arvanitas and Professor Tu illustrates not only the difference in origins of immigrants of the early 20th century and of recent years but also a remarkable change in where and how America's foreign-born now live and work. Except for large coastal cities, such as New York, San Francisco and Miami, most newer immigrants no longer congregate in large central American cities. In the country's vast interior, where most of the population lives, they more often live in suburbs or small communities. A sizable proportion are professionals who hold good jobs and have melted easily into suburban living with the comfortable white middle class.

After soaring $200 an ounce since last June, gold prices have lost more than half this gain in less than a week, including a $42.50-anounce drop in New York yesterday. It was the biggest one-day decline in almost three years. Gold finished at $400.50 an ounce in late-afternoon trading reported by the Republic National Bank, down the $42.50 from Friday and $105.20 from last Tuesday. The New York Commodity Exchange reported an almost identical decline in gold contracts for March delivery.

''I don't know how you can have a Congressional office run like a factory.

PSYCHOTHERAPY, the dialogue that people seek from professionals to meet psychological problems, is involved in a whirl of change. Indeed, anyone who last looked carefully at the field 20 years or so ago would find much of today's practice of the ''talking cure'' difficult to recognize. Today there is an apparently bewildering array of techniques and professions offering assistance, but the field is perhaps less confusing than it seems. Clear trends that have been developing over the last several years can be discerned. Psychotherapy, experts say, has evolved to meet constantly changing social needs and attitudes. A central theme of many of these changes is an orientation of psychotherapy toward providing help for people who don't necessarily fit into the traditional categories - not the neurotics or the psychotics but rather ''normal'' people who are simply troubled. Some major recent trends are these: - People are more willing to seek out therapy for specific life problems, which may not be of their own making, such as anxiety over employment, bereavement or physical illness in the family. They increasingly view psychotherapy as an aid in coping with the travails of ordinary life rather than only as a way to deal with deep, crippling psychological conditions.