In the early 1990s the world changed. As the Cold War came to an end, technocratic scientism arose from the ashes of the old struggle among the superpowers. In the US and Europe, unparalleled material prosperity dissuaded most people from looking too closely at the possible implications of the internet and biomedical innovation. But in popular literature, Michael Crichton’s best-selling novel Jurassic Park, published in 1990, forced us to imagine all the ways we were unleashing unstoppable beasts on ourselves by trying to bend the created order to unnatural ends. It was a page-turner that fleshed out CS Lewis’s thesis in The Abolition of Man: “Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.”