September 19, 1981

The Reagan Administration has decided to eliminate the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and shift its functions to other Federal law-enforcement agencies, Administration officials said today. The move was explained by the Administration as a budget-cutting measure. Advocates of gun control consider it to be a major victory for the National Rifle Association, which has been conducting a nationwide television campaign portraying the agency as ''jackbooted fascists'' who harass gun owners for technical law violations.

In the years since Russian troops occupied much of Eastern Europe there have been few occasions when the Kremlin has verbally manifested the degree of fury over developments in the Soviet bloc that it did in its letter to Polish leaders demanding that action be taken to end ''anti-Sovietism.'' The letter's existence was confirmed tonight by Tass, the official press agency, nearly 24 hours after it was published in Poland. Tass said the Soviet Ambassador to Poland, Boris I. Aristov, had called on the Polish leaders ''in connection with the provocative activities of antisocialist forces in Poland.'' The agency went on to give an extensive summary of the contents of the letter. Diplomats Wary of Forecasts A similar sequence occurred with the Kremlin's last letter to the Polish leaders, in June, when the Polish authorities released the text, and Moscow, after a delay, followed suit.

Two new crime-fighting programs -one aimed at 6,000 violent, ha bitual street criminals and the other at street robbers in pa rticular - were announced yesterday. Both will emphasize the use of detectives instead of uniformed patrol officers. Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire said that each program was based on a highly successful pilot project and would require ''substantial shifts in personnel.'' More than 200 officers will be transferred out of uniformed patrols, undercover and narcotics units by Nov. 1 and into detective squads, where they will be known as ''white shield'' detectives. While they will function as detectives, they will not hold gold shields and will not receive a detective's salary.

In recent months several groups of research scientists, working independently, have discovered evidence for the existence of individual genes in the cells of some human cancers that can switch on the cancer process in other normal, living cells. The presence of genes that can cause a normal, healthy cell to turn cancerous and run out of control raises the possibility that future research might discover how to inactivate the genes and, perhaps, short-circuit the cancer-causing process. Scientists working in the field emphasize that such findings might be many years away at best. The genes discovered by the research groups appear to be either aberrant forms of normal ones or genes that have become abnormally activated. Such genes have been found in cells from human leukemia, as well as breast, lung, colon and bladder cancers. In some cases the same gene was involved in more than one cancer type.

President Reagan, defending his economic recovery program in the aftermath of the stock market's plunge to a 16-month low, vowed today to ''fight to the last blow'' for his new round of spending cuts. Once again Mr. Reagan exhorted the financial community to foreswear its ''pessimism'' about the economic plan. He urged Wall Street to respond to the Excerpts from spee ch, page 9. ''rising tide of confidence'' on America's ''Main Street,'' instead of to the statistics that indicated the economy might be approaching a recession.