13.1 Introduction - New architectures for old monomers

One of the great assets that polymers possess is their versatility and scope for property tuning. The range of functional groups which can be incorporated into their structures together with the many different ways of fabricating them has led to multi-billion dollar industries and the employment of polymers as the key components in products as diverse as vinyl records, bullet proof vests and artificial organ implants ^{[1] [2]}. In determining what leads to these vast property ranges, it has long been recognised that in addition to simple chemical composition, both the structural conformation of single chains and the interactions between those chains are inextricably linked to the properties of polymer-based materials. Given the nature of industrial production processes and the high cost of introducing new chemical building blocks, it seems likely that the new polymers of the next century will be derived primarily from the ever-decreasing pool of perhaps a dozen existing cheap monomers ^[3]. An attractive strategy towards meeting future demands for materials with enhanced properties is thus to assemble these existing building blocks in new ways thus exploiting novel molecular-level architectures rather than the nature of the bricks from which they are built.