In the visible world, giants are both large in size and few in number. They immediately attract our attention, whether a eight-foot tall athlete, a fifteen-hundred-mile wall in China, or a hundred-foot long blue whale. Early in the twentieth century the discovery of giants in the invisible world of molecules created excitement among scientists (see A short History of Polymer Science). These giant molecules are called polymers. They fascinate us not because they are scarce, but because they are everywhere about us. In fact, people have been using polymers for thousands of years, as many of nature's most useful materials are polymers. Natural rubber, silk, and other proteins, cellulose (found in wood and cotton), and starch (potatoes) are a few examples. In fact, life itself would not be possible without polymers, since DNA and RNA, the messengers of heredity, are polymers as well.
For over half a century the Institut Charles Sadron (ICS) has played a paramount role to further our understanding of chemical, physical and mechanical properties of polymers and related soft matter systems. The actitivities of different ICS research groups have been recently regrouped to three main focus themes which will be pushed more strongly in the next couple of years: