3 Putting responsible research and innovation into practice at

摘要: In a small volume entitled Science and Survival, published in 1966, Barry Commoner, then Professor of Botany at Washington University, begins his discourse with the question ‘Is science getting out of hand?’Commoner explored many of the issues with which society is grappling in the second decade of the 21st century. Not least of these is a strident lack of trust between science and the society it purportedly serves. The concerns are not new: current issues resonate through chapter headings such as ‘Science versus society’,‘The ultimate blunder’,‘The scientist and the citizen’and finally ‘To survive on earth’. Tellingly, he uses terminology such as ‘the erosion of science’s integrity’(pp. 60–61),‘agricultural devastation’(p. 73), the ‘assault on the biosphere’(p. 75). What is clear is that for at least the last 50 years, since the very obvious devastation and salutary lessons of the Second World War, people have been aware that the planet’s ‘thin life-supporting surface’(Commoner, 1966: 110) is under siege. Yet, exponential population growth, industrial and technological development and rampant consumerism have continued without any real consideration of their effect on a finite and finely balanced biosphere. As addressed by Cochrane, Sauer and Aswani (2019) working in the field of coastal and marine science in South Africa, the