Until now, no one had built a synthetic material that could simultaneously absorb chemical building blocks, polymerize them into its own network, relieve the mechanical stresses that accumulate during the process, and reverse the whole sequence on demand. A new study published in Advanced Materials ("Rewriting Polymer Fate via Chemomechanical Coupling") reports a polymer platform that accomplishes exactly that. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology including Associate Professor Will Gutekunst of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, with collaborators at North Carolina State University, created what they call a "living" polymer: a material that can grow, shrink, heal, change its stiffness by roughly 100-fold, and be recycled back to raw monomers, all post-fabrication.