March 1, 1983

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.