August 16, 1994

RESEARCHERS say they have pinpointed a fundamental brain flaw that may be a major factor in the development of some forms of dyslexia, a learning disability that affects millions of Americans, schoolchildren and adults. The new finding, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that dyslexia is at root not a visual or ordinary hearing problem, as many have thought, but a flaw in a specific brain circuit that handles rapidly flowing auditory information. Although brain researchers familiar with the study praise it highly, most dyslexia experts have not had time to assess the new claims.

When Robin Thornburg lost her job as a $25,000-a-year paralegal, she was scared. Her husband, David, an office clerk, made barely enough to cover the groceries and the rent on their $700-a-month apartment in Arlington, Va. So, she is trying to make up the lost income by working two jobs -- as a full-time clerk for a loan company and a part-time bookkeeper for a company that rents out bodyguards. "It kind of stinks, the two of us having so many jobs," said Mrs. Thornburg, who earns $600 a week, more than matching her former pay, but must work 55 hours to do it. "You argue about money and about hours, and on top of everything, we are both trying to get through college. We go different ways too much."

In the free markets of the new China, young men are coming to realize that there is something even more precious than a new car, an electronic pager or a Swiss-made watch. And that rare commodity -- an unmarried woman -- is becoming harder and harder to find.

THE human brain is a natural wonder that boggles the mind. It is built of a hundred billion nerve cells sheathed and nourished by a trillion supporting cells. And projecting from every neuron is a delicate communications cable called an axon that splits and branches and splits again, like the crown of a great spreading oak, allowing that one nerve cell to cry out through synaptic conduits to a thousand others of its kind. All told, there are more synaptic connections encased within a single skull than there are stars flung across the universe. Neuroscientists who study the developing brain have long sought to understand just how that extraordinary neuronal circuitry gets wired up in the first place. They have struggled to identify the signals responsible for axonal guidance -- for steering the tender and tentative axon of a young nerve cell through the pandemonium of the growing brain and over to its appropriate target. Once the tip of the axon has found its correct resting spot, it can begin forming synaptic linkups with as many neurons in the neighborhood as it needs to contact to get its message across. And only with its axons in place can a brain begin to register the world around it: to see, to think, to feel, to know itself.

NEW YORK CITY PRAGMATISM DEFINES GIULIANI'S STRATEGY By bucking his own party's leadership to support President Clinton's crime bill, Mayor Giuliani has embraced a strategy that, for a Republican in a Democratic city, may well prove far more successful than partisanship: pragmatism. News analysis, B3.