Julius Rebek

In 1949 he and his family immigrated to the United States and settled in Topeka, Kansas where he graduated from Highland Park High School.

[clarification needed] In 1989 he returned to MIT, where he became the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and devised synthetic, self-replicating molecules.

When transfer takes place between the solid phases, it requires the existence of a reactive intermediate, free in solution as shown below.

Among the reactive species detected by this "Three Phase Test" were cyclobutadiene, singlet oxygen, monomeric metaphosphate, and acyl imidazoles.

[2][3] Rotors are still the most frequent chemical models for allosteric effects, and are present in many of the molecular machines pursued in other laboratories today.

[5] Versions with carboxyl groups[6] became widely used elsewhere as models for metalloenzymes (the XDK structures)[7] and in Rebek's laboratory to probe stereoelectronic effects.

… The considerable excitement that has greeted Julius Rebek's work is inspired in part by the possibilities that it raises for exploring the kind of chemical processes that led to the appearance of life on our planet."

British ethologist Richard Dawkins in his book, River out of Eden, suggests that Rebek's replicating molecules "raise the possibility of other worlds having a parallel evolution [to Earth's] but with a fundamentally different chemical basis."

These form reversibly by completely surrounding small molecule targets[8] and have become a versatile tool of modern physical organic chemistry.

A cylindrical capsule of nanometric dimensions[9] is shown above; it selects congruent guests singly or pairwise when the space inside is appropriately filled.

This experiment demonstrated the possibility that autocatalysts could exhibit competition within a population of entities with heredity, which could be interpreted as a rudimentary form of natural selection.