It is now possible to polymerise simple systems and to predict the molecular architecture that will be formed under chosen conditions, while for more complex conditions, trends can be semiquantitatively predicted and understood. The international scientific and technical community in this field now uses the mechanistic knowledge that he obtained as the key to understanding current processes and creating new processes and products. His work has put this industrially important field on a rigorous scientific footing. Gilbert and others have used this knowledge and understanding to develop means of creating new materials. One major example includes his role as leader of a collaborative project that has led to a new generation of surface coatings. He developed the first practical means to implement on industrially significant scales Dr E Rizzardo’s reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) method of controlled radical polymerisation. In recent research that builds on his work in polymerisation, Gilbert has developed a new way of understanding the biochemistry of the enzymatic processes involved in starch biosynthesis, in collaboration with Dr Melissa Fitzgerald, International Rice Research Institute, Manilla. In this new field, he applied the methods he had developed for understanding molecular-weight distributions in synthetic polymers to understanding those of natural ones. He has thus created a powerful new technique for probing the enzymatic processes in starch biosynthesis in grains, again, creating a methodology to obtain reliable mechanistic knowledge by isolating steps in highly complex systems. Each enzymatic step that creates individual chains—analysed by debranching the starch—can now be associated with particular regions in the molecular-weight distribution of a starch. This supported the applicability of one of two rival mechanistic postulates made by starch biochemists.