Dedicated to Professor William J. Evans on the occasion of his 60th birthday Nature provides mankind with highly stereoregular polyterpenes, i.e., polymers of isoprene, featuring distinct properties.[1] Natural rubber (NR, caoutchouc or cis-1,4-polyisoprene, cPIP; > 99 % cis content, M n % 2 10 6 g mol À1 ) is the most important polymer produced by plants and is the raw material for numerous rubber applications. Taking into account new developments in synthetic polymer chemistry, a mechanism for living carbocationic polymerization has recently been proposed for NR biosynthesis.[2] Gutta-percha obtained from Palaquium gutta and several other evergreen trees of East Asia is an isomer of NR displaying an all-trans (> 99 %) configuration and much lower molecular weight (M n = 1.4-1.7 10 5 g mol À1 ).[1] Unlike NR it is a thermoplastic crystalline polymer with a melting point (T m ) of 628C. Although for most applications gutta-percha has been superseded by advanced functional polymers, controlled crosslinking of synthetic trans-1,4-polyisoprene or its blending (with, for example, natural rubber, styrene-butadiene rubber, and butadiene rubber) and block copolymerization (e.g., with a-olefins) might afford new high-performance materials.[3]The synthesis of highly stereoregular cPIP with Zieglertype catalysts is well established. [4,5] In particular, catalyst mixtures with rare-earth-metal components such as neodymium represent a prominent class of high-performance catalysts for the industrial stereospecific polymerization (> 98 % cis-1,4) of 1,3-dienes, even though the molecular weights and molecular weight distributions remain difficult to control.[6] Molecular systems based on lanthanide metallocene and postmetallocene congeners afford polymers with very narrow molecular weight distributions and very high stereoregularity. [7][8][9][10] A combination of [(C 5 Me 5 ) 2 Ln(AlMe 4 )]/Al-(iBu) 3 /[Ph 3 C][B(C 6 F 5 ) 4 ] (Ln = Sm, Gd) gave cis-1,4-polybutadiene with excellent stereocontrol (up to 99.9 % cis) and narrow molecular weight distributions (M w /M n = 1.20-1.23), while the polymerization of isoprene was not observed to be living. [7] cPIP with comparable characteristics (95-99 % cis-1,4; M w /M n = 1.3-1.7) was obtained with neodymium allyl complexes in the presence of aluminum alkyls as activators [8,9] as (PNP Ph = ({2-(Ph 2 P)C 6 H 4 } 2 N], Ln = Sc, Y, Lu) were reported to yield high cis-1,4 selectivity in the living polymerization of isoprene and butadiene in the absence of any aluminum additive (> 99 % cis-1,4; M w /M n = 1.05).[11] The fabrication of synthetic gutta-percha and gutta-balata has been achieved by utilization of mixed organo-Ln/Mg initiators such as [(CMe 2 C 5 H 4 ) 2 Sm(C 3 H 5 )MgCl 2 (OEt 2 ) 2 LiCl(OEt 2 )] (> 95 % trans-1,4; M w /M n = 1.32) [12] and half-sandwich-based [(C 5 Me 4 nPr)Nd(BH 4 ) 2 (thf) 2 ]/Mg(nBu) 2 (Mg/Nd = 0.9; 98.5 % trans-1,4, M w /M n = 1.15).