The recent interest in gold catalysis provides the focus for this perspectives paper. Until recently gold has been overlooked as a key component of both homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts. Two observations in the 1980s showed that gold could be a catalyst of choice, but it is only relatively recently that gold has been shown to be a very versatile redox catalyst. In this paper aspects of both the background to this interest and some of the recent work on gold will be discussed. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.