Supramolecular chemistry is one of the most popular and fastest growing areas of experimental chemistry
and it seems set to remain that way for the foreseeable future. Everybody’s doing it! Part of the reason for
this is that supramolecular science is aesthetically appealing, readily visualised and lends itself to the translation
of everyday concepts to the molecular level. It might also be fair to say that supramolecular chemistry
is a very greedy topic. It is highly interdisciplinary in nature and, as a result, attracts not just chemists but
biochemists, biologists, environmental scientists, engineers, physicists, theoreticians, mathematicians and
a whole host of other researchers. These supramolecular scientists are people who might be described as
goal-orientated in that they cross the traditional boundaries of their discipline in order to address specifi c
objectives. It is this breadth that gives supramolecular chemistry its wide allure, and sometimes leads to
grumbling that ‘everything seems to be supramolecular these days’. This situation is aided and abetted by
one of the appealing but casual defi nitions of supramolecular chemistry as ‘chemistry beyond the molecule’,
which means that the chemist is at liberty to study pretty much any kind of interaction he or she pleases
– except some covalent ones. The situation is rather reminiscent of the hubris of some inorganic chemists in
jokingly defi ning that fi eld as ‘the chemistry of all of the elements except for some of that of carbon’.