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How the Science of Safety Helps Tackle Global Risks [Sponsored]
We're surrounded by risks of all sizes, every day. Some people might be risk-takers, while others do whatever they can to avoid them. But how can we tackle the risks that impact society on a global scale, like those linked to sustainable energy, societal health and digital technology? Science journalist Izzie Clarke explores this question in the latest podcast from Scientific American Custom Media. She sat down with Chris Cramer, chief research officer and interim president for the leading safety science organization UL Research Institutes.
This podcast was produced for UL Research Institutes by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
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April 8, 2025
10 min read
How the Science of Safety Helps Tackle Global Risks
In a busy world with increasing risks, what can be done to engineer a safer existence for humanity?
Scientific American Custom Media
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This podcast was produced for UL Research Institutes by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
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We’re surrounded by risks of all sizes, every day. Some people might be risk-takers, while others do whatever they can to avoid them. But how can we tackle the risks that impact society on a global scale, like those linked to sustainable energy, societal health and digital technology? Science journalist Izzie Clarke explores this question in the latest podcast from Scientific American Custom Media. She sat down with Christopher J. Cramer, chief research officer and interim president for the leading safety science organization UL Research Institutes.
You can learn more about safety science on the UL Research Institutes website.
Izzie Clarke: Hello and welcome to this Scientific American Custom Media podcast. I’m science journalist Izzie Clarke, and in this episode we’re exploring safety science.
Imagine going about your day and the risks you’d encounter without safety measurements. Crossing a road would be a nightmare if traffic lights didn’t exist. Eating would be left to a game of chance without food standards in place. And don’t even think about the chaos of a lab without protective equipment and procedures. But in a busy world with increasing risks around energy, public health and technology, what can be done to engineer a safer world?
Thankfully, that’s what a leading safety science organization is currently addressing. UL Research Institutes takes a multidisciplinary approach to identify risks to humanity and our planet and counter them with science-based research designed to benefit people everywhere.
I spoke with Chris Cramer, chief research officer and interim president for UL Research Institutes, about the biggest safety challenges of today and what sets the organization apart from others.
Chris Cramer: UL Research Institutes is one of three organizations that all trace their heritage back 130 years now to the initial founding of Underwriters Laboratories. And Underwriters Laboratories, throughout its history, has endeavored to make the world a safer place. And UL Research Institutes addresses that challenge by doing basic and applied research in order to tackle what we think of as the most pressing challenges in what we call safety science.
When we think about areas that we want to tackle, we ask ourselves three questions. First, is it important, right? Is the risk a salient one? Does it affect a lot of people? Second, is there white space? Obviously, if a lot of other organizations are already addressing that, and I think of sort of classical health risks—cancer, diabetes, biomedical space. A lot of investment against those, where it’s not that we would necessarily bring anything new or revolutionary to the table.
But there are a number of areas where there is a dearth of attention, if you like. And as a result, if we can build capacity and build capability to address those challenges, then we view that as a real opportunity. And of course, we do have that 130-year legacy. So we have some areas that have always been our focus and we’ve established a leadership position and have outstanding capabilities, and we pursue those.
Clarke: Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s really interesting because we are living in a time where there is a real need for science-based solutions. From your perspective, what do UL Research Institutes, otherwise known as ULRI, see as the most pressing issues for the twenty-first century?
Cramer: I wish there were only one pressing issue. It would be so much easier for all of us! When we surveyed recently the universe of potential risks and asked ourselves those questions about where would we best deploy our resources, we ended up focusing on what we call three grand challenge commitments.
So, for us, those three grand challenges are building resilience for a sustainable future. And if that sounds like it might have climate change embedded in it, it certainly does. Sustainability is in there. Advancing individual and societal health in the twenty-first century—what interests us are the health challenges that derive from anthropogenic activity, right?
Since the industrial revolution, we’ve been putting things in the environment and the air and water, and many of those can have health consequences, although they may be poorly understood. And then finally, promoting safety at the human–digital interface. It’s really the degree to which we’ve handed over control of a lot of critical systems to digital control.
The one that’s in the news every day, nowadays, is artificial intelligence. But even before that, there was a substantial amount of digital entities that are taking on more tasks that used to be handled by humans, and consequences from social media misinformation and the like. These all constitute important risks as well.
Clarke: Let’s start with resilience for a sustainable future. I think there’s been a lot of focus on energy over the recent months and years, even. So, people understandably need to power their homes, but we’re also living in a circumstance where there are severe climate threats. There is a need to move away from those unsustainable methods that we can’t rely on in the future, or may not be able to, but that could then add pressure to the system that we rely on. So, how can safety science mitigate that?
Cramer: There’s an ever-growing demand for energy, power, and that’s not going to go away. Our society is going to keep asking for more and more. What we need to do is decarbonize the sources of energy, and that involves using renewable resources. And one aspect of renewable resources that is a bit challenging is their intermittency. The wind blows when it blows, the sun shines when it shines.
And so, in order to make the best use of those resources, you need to be able to store the energy that’s generated when they’re online and then access it when they’re offline and when you can balance loads. That’s why so much energy does now come from renewable resources. But that storage mechanism is typically called a battery, right?
The first law of thermodynamics is a very rigorous master. It says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can change form. And so if you put a lot of energy into a battery and then, accidentally, you allow it to change form into, say, thermal energy, chemical energy, what have you, that can have disastrous consequences, right? Large fires, off-gassing of toxic substances.
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And these are now well known from electric vehicles burning, e-mobility batteries that go into what’s called thermal runaway when the battery heats up and eventually ignites and potentially explodes. So, we are very active in that space, in trying to understand what are the circumstances that can lead to a thermal runaway event, how can you mitigate the use cases to try to avoid that.
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