May 3, 1994

Four years after Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped the first of 20 people end their lives, a Michigan jury today cleared him of charges that he had violated a state law prohibiting assisted suicide by helping a terminally ill man take his life last year. The jurors cited uncertainties over Dr. Kevorkian's motive, the wisdom of the two-year-old law under which he had been prosecuted, and precisely where he had helped a 30-year-old man end the agony of his degenerative nerve disease.

The biggest question on the minds of many market analysts last week was this: How could it be that American interest rates were rising and yet the dollar was suddenly falling against both the Japanese yen and the German mark? Normally, when American interest rates rise, the expectation is that the dollar will get stronger, because Germans and Japanese will want to buy dollars to put them in American banks or bonds to take advantage of the higher interest returns. But instead, it went the other way.

In the latest consolidation of the health care industry, Roche Holding Ltd., a drug maker based in Switzerland, said yesterday that it had agreed to acquire the Syntex Corporation, a troubled medium-sized pharmaceutical company, in a deal valued at $5.3 billion. Industry executives said more mergers and acquisitions involving drug makers, as well as hospitals and health maintenance organizations, would probably follow as health care companies struggled with growing competition and demands in Washington for lower prices for drugs and health care services.

Mrs. Clinton's Role Queried In a Congressional report on the travel office affair, Hillary Rodham Clinton is quoted as having urged a White House official to replace workers with "our people." Page B8. Roche Holding of Switzerland agreed to acquire Syntex, a troubled drug company, for $5.3 billion. Page D1. U.N. Peace Force Sought The United Nations is asking African nations whether they are willing to take part in a peacekeeping force for Rwanda. Page A3. Sheik's Documents Seized F.B.I. agents searched the home of one of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman's aides and seized copies of the cleric's writings, lawyers said. Page B1.

DR. RICHARD D. KOLODNER leaned back in his chair and said he was as surprised as anyone that he has emerged as a leader in the scientific race to capture the genes that cause colon cancer. His surprise is not just false modesty. For one thing, his lab at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute here is tiny, yet twice in the last year, he has emerged neck and neck with the much larger and better known laboratory of Bert Vogelstein at Johns Hopkins University, in races that ended in dead heats. For another, Dr. Kolodner's original research goal was not to understand human cancer at all but to work out an arcane detail about gene repairs in bacteria and yeast.