Only an infinitesimal fraction of publications in chemistry directly spawn new research fields. However, one good case in point is the report by I. Horváth and J. Rábai from 1994 that coined the term fluorous and provided the first example of fluorous biphasic catalysis.[1] Fluorous substances are simultaneously hydrophobic and lipophobic, and researchers quickly recognized a variety of useful applications for this phase-orthogonality, which in many cases has the additional benefit of being temperature-dependent. Indeed, biological and physical chemists had been crafting and studying fluorous materials for some time (cloaked in other nomenclature), and they found eager new partners among synthetic chemists who took up the quest for novel recyclable catalysts and reagents, tagging strategies for mixture synthesis and separations, and other objectives.
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