February 16, 1992

Just hours before the film designer Anton Furst jumped to his death late last year, he telephoned his first wife in London and tried to explain how he was feeling at that moment in his life. Those feelings, he told her, were best expressed by one of his own dark and brooding artworks. "While we were together," recalls Jane Furst, who like her former husband was trained as an artist, "he produced eight paintings directly connected with his interest in the Russian Constructivists. They're very black. One is a collage, an image of a man cut out of a magazine. He's on a platform that is sort of floating in space. He is looking down into the darkness.

Before the last candidate debate, Paul E. Tsongas was in a practice session with his aides when he suddenly asked a question that sent the room into a hush. "What do I say if they ask me, 'Did you ever?' " the sad-faced candidate said.

The stock market now seems to believe that the recession is almost over. The question for investors, however, may be whether all the fun is gone even before the growth begins. Notwithstanding all the bull market publicity, many investors have not found joy so far in 1992. The Dow Jones industrial average did hit a record high of 3,276.83 on Wednesday, but 12 of the 30 Dow stocks have lost ground so far this year, among them such long-term favorites as Merck and Philip Morris. The best of the Dow stocks is much-maligned General Motors. And bonds, which everyone knew were sure to advance rapidly, have generally fallen in price.

VIVIAN WALTERS stood next to the 64-ounce containers of Heinz ketchup adding figures on white ruled paper that rested on a 24-can case of Pepsi-Cola in his shopping wagon. His wife, Phillipa, stood a few feet away holding coupons and scanning the shelves for the items on her shopping list. Her sister Michelle pushed another shopping wagon behind them.

Every company has its legends. At Merck and Company the latest is about Proscar, the new drug that shrinks enlarged prostates and is awaiting Government approval. It involves a remote Caribbean mountain village with a population of male pseudohermaphrodites and an obscure medical paper about them. P. Roy Vagelos, Merck's chairman, seems never to tire of telling the story, and anyone inquiring about Proscar's prospects as the company's next billion-dollar megadrug is sure to hear it from other Merck executives as well. And no wonder, since the Proscar legend says a lot about survival in the bare-knuckles competitiveness of the drug industry these days, illustrating how basic research and unrelenting patience must be combined to bring a drug to market. The story goes like this: In 1974, Dr. Julianne Imperato-McGinley of Cornell Medical College in New York told a conference on birth defects about a group of hermaphroditic children in the Caribbean. Appearing sexually ambiguous at birth, they were raised as girls. But at puberty they grew external genitalia and developed deep voices and male musculature. Her research group had found that a genetic trait caused a deficiency of an enzyme called 5-alpha reductase. This suppressed levels of the male hormone dihydrotestosterone, causing alteration of the male children's sexual development.