Safety science, a founding fathers’ retrospection

•Safety Science was established at DUT in 1978, based on interdisciplinarity, problem orientation and a systems approach. As such it is no different from other scientific objects of research regarding the health, environment and security of integral human beings.•Its development as a general scientific activity faced fundamental differences between the application domains and orientation of social and technical disciplines at a methodological level.•By shifting from a discipline focus to a problem orientation in a systemic context did not fully succeed in creating the hoped for synthesis between technical, social and design domains.•Problem solving, based on engineering design principles remained underexposed due to underlying specific, but implicitly paradigmatic differences. This caused a stalling in the dialectic process of creating a new scientific discipline.•A move to safety as a scientific activity in general, requires a paradigm shift. Three building blocks are necessary as additional notions: a full information supply, an engineering design methodology and a multiple intervention perspective.