I was idly scrolling Bluesky for some news that was not depressing when I chanced upon an article by Roger Highfield dealing with a recent advance in gene editing. It reminded me of two previous posts I had written, one back in 2016 on “Precision metaphors in a messy biological world” and another in which I discuss the gothic metaphors used by Highfield in a previous article on the ‘dark genome’.
In this post I’ll come back to the precision/messiness theme and dissect the metaphors used in the current piece on gene editing in the way I dissected the ones used in the dark genome article a couple of months ago. I’ll then compare what I found and engage in some speculations about a new aspect of science communication, namely the use of metaphorical genres.
The blog post
On 17 December 2025, the Science Museum, of which Roger Highfield is the director, published a blog post by Highfield and Curator Sarah Bond entitled “Tidy Fix for Messy DNA: One Tool to Tackle Thousands of Genetic Diseases”.
The post is based on a chat with “the American molecular biologist David Liu about his new gene editing strategy that, remarkably, addresses a common cause of around a third of genetic diseases”.
Building on advances in gene editing and base editing, Liu and his team are developing a universal prime editing system called PERT to potentially treat genetic diseases, such as Cystic Fibrosis or Tay Sachs, caused by so-called nonsense mutations. PERT stands for ‘prime editing-mediated readthrough of premature termination codons’. These codons are essentially the ‘STOP’ signs that can appear too early in the genetic instructions to build a protein and thus make a mess – we’ll get back to those later.
The title
The title immediately attracted my attention, and my metaphor whiskers started to twitch. Let’s start with analysing the title and then the rest of the article and see where the metaphors take us.
The title is based on a contrast between ‘tidy’ and ‘messy’, a contrast that has been doing quite a bit of work in gene editing discourse over at least a decade, as the title of my own blog post from 2016 shows. ‘Messy DNA’ suggests, disorder and chaos — something that needs tidying or cleaning up. There is also the implication of dirt, contamination and imperfection. ‘Tidy fix’ suggests that order can be restored by adopting a simple solution. This conjures up a manageable, almost effortless, domestic task, using perhaps a good cleaning product – neat and tidy.
The title domesticates the science, framing complex molecular biology as a housekeeping problem. Is that framing good or bad? That depends; it might raise overblown expectations, but it certainly makes cutting-edge gene therapy less intimidating and more approachable. The title grabs the reader. That’s part of good science communication. As Tim Radford, the famous science writer, who once described stem cells as a ‘magic tablecloth’, pointed out back in 2009: “You don’t grab headlines by describing embryonic stem cell research as an expensive, laboratory-based technology of unproven merit guaranteed to lead to many years of frustration punctuated by small flashes of enlightenment.”
If, grabbed by the title, you continue to read the whole article, like me, you discover an interesting tension: the article goes on to show that the ‘fix’ isn’t actually that tidy at all. It requires scanning 418 tRNA genes, producing thousands of variants, worrying about off-target effects, and navigating complex regulatory hurdles. So, the title promises simplicity while the content reveals complexity. It’s always good to go beyond the headline and beyond headline grabbing metaphors and to plunge into the article itself.
The metaphors
As we have seen, the title sets the scene for the article and contrasts scientific precision with DNA messiness. What about the metaphors running through the article? How are metaphors used to make complex molecular biology concepts accessible?
Most of the metaphors I found did this by comparing such complex issues to familiar everyday processes like writing, editing, and manufacturing, that is, using some of the most common and conventional metaphors in genomic science and genomic science communication.
Some of the main conceptual metaphors I found are: DNA IS A TEXT/LANGUAGE; CRISPR TOOLS ARE WRITING/EDITING TOOLS and ‘STOP SIGNALS’ ARE PUNCTUATION MARKS; GENES/PROTEINS ARE MACHINES and DEVELOPING GENETIC TREATMENTS IS MANUFACTURING.
DNA as text
There is talk about spelling mistakes in DNA letters and the genetic code; genetic sequences as words spelling out how to make proteins and when to stop or start making them; misspellings causing disease; CRISPR as a ‘search-and-replace function in a genetic word processor’; and so on.
With this computational metaphor we get back to the precision vs messiness of the title of Highfield’s post. When CRISPR first ‘went public’, it was often described as using molecular scissors to cut DNA. However, early CRISPR procedures were quickly criticised by scientists complaining about how crude and destructive, even messy, they were. Soon new techniques like base and prime editing came along which were supposed to be more clean, tidy and precise.
This clash of views is nicely encapsulated in one part of Highfield’s blog post, where Liu is quoted as saying: “’As my mom asked me when I likened CRISPR-Cas9 to scissors: ‘How can you fix DNA with scissors?’. So, Prof Liu and his team developed a refined approach more akin to a ‘find and replace’ function in a genetic word processor”. Nature’s messy CRISPR approach is replaced by modern and more precise computational one – the prime editor.
There is also an interesting new metaphor relating to the core of the new type of gene editing technique, based on trying to ‘edit’ out something called ‘nonsense mutations’. A nonsense mutation basically puts a full stop or STOP signal or a stop codon in the wrong place and prevents the DNA building the full protein it is supposed to produce.
From text to machinery
And so, we get from spelling/writing/reading metaphors, including punctuation marks, to building and manufacturing. Indeed, when talking about these stop signals, reference is made to “machinery to coordinate protein manufacture”. I was picturing something like a Victorian railway signal box, that is to say, machinery that coordinates movement and knows when to signal ‘stop’ and ‘go. And there is more talk of machinery….
Molecular machinery
CRISPR-based gene therapies have been making the news recently. However, the article points out that this remains “a cottage industry”, where creating “bespoke” therapies (such as for baby KJ) is small-scale, artisanal and labour-intensive. In contrast, the new gene editing technique developed by Liu and his colleagues is hoped to be more akin to a large-scale, efficient and standardised industrial/manufacturing approach. This would be based on repurposing “an old piece of molecular machinery called the ribosome”.
In the end, you would have a single, so-called ‘disease-agnostic’, genome-editing strategy that might be able to treat a broad class of genetic diseases with medicines that target not just mutated genes but the cellular processes that ‘interpret’ them.
The metaphors of reading, writing, spelling and editing, combined with those of manufacturing and machinery are less domestic than those used in the title, but together they can be seen as ‘domesticating’ the genome.
In the following, I’ll compare what Highfield did in this article in terms of metaphorical framing with what he did when writing about advances related to the so-called ‘dark genome’ and reflect on a new aspect of metaphor use that marks good science communication.
Metaphors, modes and genres
Let’s briefly compare the metaphors used in the older ‘dark genome’ article and in the new ‘prime editing’ article.
In the prime-editing article we find domestic/tidy/manageable metaphors (housekeeping, word processing, fixing typos and punctuation), together with precision machinery and manufacturing metaphors. In the dark genome article we found, by contrast, gothic and uncanny metaphors (darkness, hidden things, mystery, haunting). The prime-editing article with its domestication metaphors invites confidence, optimism and agency, while the dark genome article with its gothic haunting metaphors invites wonder, unease and perhaps some respectful distance.
The dark genome naturally lends itself to gothic imagery (the unknown, the shadowy parts we don’t understand), while a novel gene editing technology lends itself to reassuring domestic or domesticating imagery (making the unfamiliar seem manageable and manufacturable).
These metaphors can be seen as two genres of metaphor applied to two modes of science, science in discovery mode and science in intervention mode. One genre of metaphors portrays science as controllable (domestic and technical), the other as mysterious (gothic and uncanny). The interesting thing is that the genre of metaphor is well-matched to the mode of science, and in both cases the metaphors are used successfully to make something complex engaging and memorable.
Roger Highfield seems to have a knack for choosing vivid, thematic metaphors that make complex science accessible. The dark genome article and its gothic metaphors highlighted how science reveals something strange to us, something mysterious we can explore, while the prime editing article and its cleaning, editing and fixing metaphors shows how science can potentially empower us to shape ourselves (within limits).
So, it seems that science communication also requires some skill in orchestrating different metaphorical moods and genres that match the scientific modes and content. Such metaphors can guide readers into the labyrinth of complexity that is genomic science. Readers like me might just stay for the metaphors but readers with more knowledge also get insights into the complexity beyond the metaphors, the codons, the ribosomes, the tRNA and much more. But to get access to that complexity, you have to read the article yourself.
Alongside choosing the right metaphors and the right metaphor genre, science communicators also need to make sure that simple and evocative metaphors, be they sourced from gothic haunting, domestic chores or well-known machinery don’t oversimplify and evoke unrealistic public expectations. They have to find the right balance between tidy scientific promise and messy scientific reality.
Science communication is both art and craft, requiring practice and sensitivity to context.
Epilogue
I can’t resist ending with another quote from Tim Radford which encapsulates some of the issues explored above. He talks about science stories in newspapers, but what he says applies equally to science stories in blog posts: “even the science stories in newspapers are just that, stories. They are drawn from the world of science. They are told for serious purposes. But they are told so as to give pleasure. It is not our business to advance the public education in science, except by the way, and as a kind of happy accident. It is our business to be read, and to be read, we use – without apology or embarrassment – tools that have kept storytellers in business since Homer filed the first frontline despatches from a military stalemate at the walls of Troy. These tools include a wide range of figures of speech, among them metaphor and hyperbole, and although these are tools that may be used clumsily, or even very clumsily, all I can say is: just try writing without them, and see how far you get.”
Image: Wannapik
Acknowledgment: I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 as a ‘thinking partner’ for a first draft of this post. All mistakes are mine!
Making Science Public 
Leave a comment