May 10, 1983

SCIENTISTS in California and Australia have eliminated diabetes in some laboratory animals by giving them pancreas glands transplanted from fetuses of the same species. The research represents one of several dramatically new modes of attack on human diabetes, a widespread disease that still, despite decades of research, can be neither prevented nor cured but only alleviated, and even with the best medical management continues to cause blindness, loss of limbs and premature death in some patients. If applied to humans, however, the new technique of transplanting the fetal pancreas might raise a highly emotional issue. The only source for such transplants would be aborted human fetuses. In the United States, a Federal commission studied the propriety of using human fetal tissues for medical research, in the mid-1970's and found it ethically acceptable. That determination was written into regulations of what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. But in Australia, the pancreas transplant research has evoked recent protests from antiabortion activists even though the first use of the technique in humans may still be several years away.

The publisher of Stern, the West German magazine that bought bogus Hitler diaries for $3.3 million, filed fraud charges today against the reporter who said he had discovered them. The publisher also suggested that the reporter, who apparently has disappeared, kept some of the money. Henri Nannen, the Stern publisher, took the action in a Hamburg court against Gerd Heidemann, 51 years old, a journalist whom the magazine lauded two weeks ago as a ''bloodhound'' responsible for the biggest scoop in postwar history. Stern has already published some of the bogus material.

Like most village boards, the one here usually deals with issues such as zoning variances and road repaving that keep suburban governments yawning along for hours. But now the five-member board finds itself balancing the Constitution's separation of government and religion with the Old Testament's prohibition against Sabbath-day labor. At issue is something called an eruv, a line that delineates an area in which Orthodox Jews on Saturdays can do a form of labor - carrying - that would normally be forbidden to them on the Sabbath except in their homes. The eruv here - a continuous nylon cord strung along utility poles, parallel to power lines - cuts across several villages and encompasses 15 square miles. Orthodox residents of Lawrence, on the South Shore of Long Island, have asked village officials to extend the area by 10 percent. The extension involves only Lawrence.

''I always was of the conviction that Heidemann believed in the diaries.

When the Soviet Union built a headquarters for Comecon, the trading bloc that links Moscow and its Communist allies, officials selected a prime site by the Moscow River and erected one of the capital's tallest buildings, a 31-story steel-andglass structure that looks out on an unlimited horizon. More than a decade later, the view is about the most heartening thing left for the organization, whose bleak economic prospects and internal strains have developed to the point where it has had to repeatedly postpone a long-planned summit meeting. The meeting, which would be the first since 1971, has been in preparation since at least early 1981, when it was mentioned by the then Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, at the Soviet party's 26th Congress. But four high-level meetings in Moscow this year, including one that ended last week, have been unable to agree on an agenda. Since such gatherings in the Communist world are held only to ratify agreements already made, this is tantamount to acknowledging that the disputes remain too wide for accommodation.