(FORTUNE Magazine) – WHILE POETS have long extolled the uniqueness of each individual, biometrics technology is making a business out of it. Biometrics is the science of taking a biological characteristic, such as a fingerprint, and quantifying it. Devices that can do this are being installed at military bases and other places that now employ guards to screen admissions. Eventually, biometrics may be economical enough to use in verifying the identity of bank customers. The virtues of biometrics are clear. I.D. cards and credit cards can be filched or forged, and identification numbers can be forgotten by their owners or found out by strangers. But nobody can palm off his fingerprints as someone else's. Biometrics is still an infant industry, with scarcely $5 million in factory sales last year. But Joseph P. Freeman, whose market research firm in Newtown, Connecticut, tracks the security business, projects sales of about % $100 million a year by 1990. Freeman believes biometric devices will make their first big inroads by replacing guards who check photo badges in high- security areas. Fingermatrix of White Plains, New York, is shipping a product that will guard access to a U.S. naval intelligence command post in Norfolk, Virginia. Bolstered by this invention, the stock of Fingermatrix, which sold at $4.75 a share a year ago, recently traded at $7.25. Yet the nine-year-old company has yet to make a dime: it lost $4 million on sales of $110,000 in fiscal 1984. The device, which scans fingerprints, is user-friendly. A person puts his finger, any finger, in a slot on a scanning machine (see picture). Within five seconds a microprocessor translates the print into digital code--256 bytes per finger--and matches it against codes stored in the computer's memory. Other ways of fingering the good guys come from two California companies, Stellar Systems of San Jose and Identix Inc. of Palo Alto. A subsidiary of Wackenhut, which sells guard services and security systems, Stellar markets a product that recognizes a person's hand when it is placed on a scanning device. The University of Georgia is using Stellar machines to identify students eligible to eat in its cafeterias. Identix, founded in 1982, raised $2.25 million to develop a fingerprint device. Early this year the FBI bought a system to control access to, of all places, an area where fingerprints are processed. Another biometrics technique relies on scanning blood vessels in the retina. A device that uses this method is produced by Eyedentify Inc., based in Beaverton, Oregon. The product is a machine fitted with what looks like a pair of binoculars. A person simply looks into the eyepieces and presses a button. Identification is quicker than you can say Sherlock Holmes. Fingermatrix hopes to cash in on the potentially huge market in electronic banking. Banks are promoting debit cards, which holders can use to get cash at automated teller machines or to debit their bank accounts when they buy merchandise. Consumers might feel more secure if strangers couldn't steal their cards and siphon money from their accounts. Biometrics could eliminate the cards, though consumers would have to supply an I.D. number to permit the computer to make swift matchups without searching its entire memory. At $7,000 to $10,800 each, the various biometric devices are cheaper than guards but are too costly to install at every automated teller machine or , cash register. Fingermatrix thinks that if its machine were mass-produced, the price would drop from $10,000 to perhaps $3,500 and eventually go lower. It would need to. Some bankers say $2,000 is the most they would pay; others say $500 would be tops.