August 4, 1992

BY traditional reckoning, DNA is the benign dictator of the cell, the all-knowing molecule that dispenses commands to create enzymes, metabolize food or die a gracious death. But a series of new discoveries suggest that DNA is more like a certain type of politician, surrounded by a flock of protein handlers and advisers that must vigorously massage it, twist it and, on occasion, reinvent it before the grand blueprint of the body can make any sense at all. Scientists have recently found an extraordinary class of proteins that serve almost exclusively as molecular musclemen, able to grab the cell's genetic material and, in a fraction of a second, kink the strands into hairpin curves. Then, just as quickly as they flexed the molecule of life, the proteins may jump off and allow the DNA regions to snap back to straightness.

AT the New York Botanical Garden, the abnormally cool summer of 1992 has thrown the schedules of flowering plants thoroughly out of kilter. Throughout the Northeast, beaches and mountain campgrounds have been discouragingly cold. And around the Great Lakes and in northern New England, temperatures have lately dipped into the 30's. "I don't think I've ever seen that in July," Jim Wagner, a veteran analyst at the National Weather Service's Climate Analysis Center at Camp Springs, Md., said of the low readings in the North. "It's almost reminiscent of the year without a summer in 1816."

A. Alfred Taubman's shopping mall empire plans to sell shares to the public, hoping to raise between $335 million and $389 million from investors who would get a 22 percent stake in a group of 19 large shopping malls from California to Connecticut, the company announced yesterday. The move would effectively free Mr. Taubman of hundreds of millions of dollars of personal debt. The company said the offering and the accompanying restructuring would enable it to slash debt and expand. It said it planned to enlarge some large regional shopping centers and might buy or build others.

When Denise Galarza Sepulveda told her high school guidance counselor that she dreamed of one day teaching at a university, the counselor looked at her and rolled her eyes. Ms. Galarza Sepulveda had good grades, but she was the only Puerto Rican in her class. Her guidance counselor had approached other, nonminority, students and suggested they apply to college. With deadlines looming, Ms. Galarza Sepulveda asked for an appointment and offered up her dreams.

WHILE shrimp barbecued in a tangy marinade may provide your taste buds with a burst of simple delight, researchers who study the workings of individual taste cells have recently shown that those sensory organs are far from simple. Such a dish would send the taste buds into overdrive as they raced through a series of recently discovered biophysical reactions to process the complex seasonings even before you swallowed the first bite. The information gleaned from taste-cell studies, mainly on animals like the mudpuppy and catfish, is expected to lead eventually to many tangible benefits. These include modifying people's "taste appetites" to aid in weight control, make dull, nutritious foods taste better, improve the taste perceptions and appetites of the elderly, produce tastier substitutes for sugars and salt, and develop drugs to counter taste disorders.