December 23, 1999

THE house, like a family, has its secrets. The domestic surfaces lie, until you start listening to your memory of them, until you look at their commonplaces as clues. When Mary Gordon, the best-selling author, was 13, she went through the drawers of a boarder renting a room in her mother's house, an incident she recounts in her new memoir, ''Seeing Through Places'' (Scribner), to be published next month.

GiftCertificates.com, Internet startup retailer that markets gift certificates, is engaged in daily frenzy placing orders during hectic, make-or-break year-end holiday season; company's fortunes, like those of competitors, will be determined largely by how well it copes with mundane matters such as order handling, packing, shipping and answering customers' questions over phone--tasks done mostly by high school graduates; photos (M)

Scientists in Oregon say they have installed jellyfish genes in monkey embryos, using technique that might eventually be used to create monkeys with added human genes; such a technique would allow those genes to be studied for development of treatments for human diseases; this research raises host of troubling questions about reproductive technology; possibility of adding genes to human embryos raises emotionally fraught issue of human genetic engineering; current study at Oregon Primate Research Center is published in journal Molecular Human Reproduction (M)

Article describes scene in midtown Manhattan during Christmas season; photo (M)

Programmers are developing high-immersion, interactive games in which players show up as themselves inside computer-generated environments and, once there, they can participate in all events; action is controlled by what the computer's video camera sees the player doing; first commercial examples of new immersion technology--sometimes called Video as Input (VAI), are appearing in computer games and activities with names like VBall, Horse and Club Tune; chart on how VAI technology works (M)