June 15, 1993

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld today the constitutionality of the Federal pension law that requires employers to make good on their financial obligations when they withdraw from an industrywide pension plan. The case was an important test of the law Congress passed 13 years ago to remove employers' incentives to avoid financial liability by pulling out of weak pension plans.

GEOPHYSICISTS have recently made striking progress in understanding the mechanism of the great heat engine within the earth. Over the last several months they have reached a rough consensus that the vast plates that comprise the ocean floor sink deep into the earth's mantle, only to be recycled into giant ascending plumes of hot rock. The plumes, driven, some believe, by heat from the earth's core, emerge to form strings of oceanic islands like the Hawaiian chain or to blanket continents with huge sheets of lava. The discoveries, said Dr. Michael E. Wysession, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who is an authority on the earth's interior, constitute "a second revolution," comparable in scientific terms to the theory of plate tectonics, which, when it came to be accepted three decades ago, showed that the continents had been in constant motion over the course of geological time, carried along by great plates.

Only an eternal optimist would have left the ninth international AIDS meeting here last week believing that new drugs will be available anytime soon to save the lives of the 14 million people now infected with the virus that causes AIDS. Or believing that a vaccine would be developed in time to prevent the number of those infected from soaring to at least 30 million by the year 2000, as the World Health Organization predicts. A realist, on the other hand, would be heeding the one clear message sounded at the meeting: prevention is the only way to stop the alarming spread of the virus, H.I.V., throughout the world.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, which has long basked in its role as a protector of infants and children, now stands accused by law enforcement officials and Nestle's United States unit of participating in a price-fixing scheme by the country's biggest infant formula producers. The 45,000-member medical group is a defendant in two lawsuits that charge it conspired with major formula companies that promote their products through doctors and hospitals. The suits say the academy and the companies tried to stifle competition from other manufacturers that reach the public directly by advertising. The doctors have long held that advertising infant formula would persuade new mothers not to breast-feed, the form of feeding that experts agree is nutritionally preferable. 'Caught Up in Greed' But court documents indicate that the medical group, while repeatedly pressing for an advertising prohibition, looked for but could not find any scientific evidence to support its claim that advertising formula deterred breast-feeding. Meanwhile, over the last decade, the group took millions of dollars from formula makers like Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb and American Home Products, which use doctors and hospitals to promote their products.

Last March, when President Clinton was presented with the opportunity to make his first Supreme Court selection, he told aides he wanted to take his time, hit a "home run" with his nominee, and choose someone who would make everyone stand up and say, "Wow." But what was supposed to have been one of the most personally exciting decisions of Mr. Clinton's early Presidency in the end had the appearance of an 11th-hour scramble, with the bodies of other would-be nominees left strewn on the field and three months' careful deliberations boiled down to 36 hours of rapid-fire decisions.