BRAVE NEW (MEDICAL) WORLD\Technology expected to revolutionize health care.

Byline: Lini S. Kadaba Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

While some will predict this year's crazy ins and outs or who's lusting after whom on the star front, another type of crystal-ball gazer will speculate on trends in medicine.

These futurists couldn't care less about Di and Charles or Clinton's chance at re-election or the hot new color. They focus instead on the year 2000 and beyond.

By assessing innovations that are near, these researchers and consultants try to forecast far-off trends. Some samples:

The information age will pale next to the nano age, where tiny, tiny machines will revolutionize fields such as health care, says futurist Arthur B. Shostak, professor of sociology at Drexel University.

Everything will be custom-tailored, from color to our bodies and moods to prosthetic body parts and drugs. Here's a look at some of the intriguing, even fanciful, forecasts for the fields of health and science.

Genetic engineering. As the Human Genome Project continues to unravel the genetic code that determines each person's individual makeup - everything from eye color to diseases, gene therapies to fix what's wrong will become more commonplace. (The project's goal is to map all 23 pairs of chromosomes by 2005.)

"It sort of turns the whole emphasis of health care on its head. Instead of trying to fix things once they occur, we can use this custom technology to fix things before they occur," said Andy Hines, staff futurist for the consulting group Coates & Jarrett in Washington, D.C.

But as we become more facile at turning genetic switches off and on, even more ethical questions surely will arise. "I think we'll be able to re-engineer humans," said Clem Bezold, executive director of the Institute for Alternative Futures. "The more we talk about it as a society, (the more) it will make abortion look tame."

Robots. More and more, these gizmos will take care of tasks mundane, messy and dangerous. Already, Robodoc, a device under development by Integrated Surgical Systems, can assist in hip replacement surgery. The surgeon uses a computer workstation to view 3-D images of the patient's femur, select an appropriate prosthesis and position the image of the prosthesis in the femur.

This data is saved and read by the robot's control computer. Then Robodoc executes the plan under supervision of a surgeon.

The nano age. Nanomedicine will use very small mechanisms to target problem spots in our bodies. For example, a tiny bulldozer of sorts would clear out cholesterol, like so much rubble, from arteries, making angioplasty obsolete.

"It is the hottest field in medical frontiers," Drexel's Shostak said. "Nano is the third great revolution - agriculture, industrial and nano."

"Nano" is a word from the Greek that means dwarf.

Nanotechnology holds the possibility of allowing us to assemble atoms to create whatever we want.

Researchers envision an assembler - a very small robotic device - that will be able to push atoms into place, making foods with better tastes, plastics with lighter weight and increased strength, and computer chips a million times faster than today's.

It could also lead to machines able to repair specific human cells, researchers say.

Spare body parts. The use of synthetic parts and devices will boom. Hines said one estimate predicts that, by 2020, a person older than 50 "without" a synthetic part or implant will be the exception.

"We can see people becoming more and more synthetic, moving toward a cyborg, where there's some intelligence inside," he said.

These replacement parts could also make use of nanotechnology.

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Photo Robots left the "Twilight Zone" long ago - there's even one under development called Robodoc that will help perform hip-replacement operations - under a real doctor's supervision, of course.