Comment by vikramkr

I'd argue that the molecular scissors argument is actually adequately descriptive and holds up to a bit of metaphor overextending. You totally can cut and paste gene sequences using CRISPR. That's the whole point of Homology Directed Repair (HDR). And much like actual sets and crafts, it is a lot easier to make crude cuts all over the place than to elegantly glue pieces back together into a useful end product. HDR still suffers from low efficiency and so on. And the riot analogy for alzheimers is great, but it doesn't require you to give up the scissor analogy either. You arent stopping a riot with scissors, while on the other ha d you totally could stop a riot with malware (shut down every messaging service somehow so that there isn't any way to coordinate).