The importance of the selective activation of alkanes for science and technology in the forthcoming decades does not need to be explicitly pointed out in this thematic issue of Chemical ReViews. Instead, we would like to summarize the development and the state-of-art of experimental and theoretical methods for the investigation of model reactions for alkane activation in the gas phase. 1 However, before doing so let us address the question, how other scientists, both in academia as well as industry, can profit from such model studies in the gas phase, usually involving very small, charged species under conditions in a mass spectrometer which are very far from real catalysis. To this end, we refer to the synthesis of HCN as a reasonably simple example of how large-scale technical processes can be investigated in microscopic models.