Crop scientists often claim that gene editing will significantly increase food security and other wicked problems. However, various publics are not convinced that the potential risks are offset by the promised benefits. The crux of this disagreement is often unpacked in terms of different values, lack of scientific understanding, or a failure of crop scientists to viewed as trustworthy. This paper revisits the current stalemate between crop scientists and publics, and the resulting conceptual meta-impasse in the scholarly literature on these conflicts. It uses a policy analysis framework to challenge the traditional view that public policies are responses to problems that pre-exist outside of the policy process, waiting to be discovered and solved. Instead, if we view policies as containing implicit representations of the supposed ‘problems’ that they purport to address, along with unrecognized assumptions and silences, it becomes clear that inadequate attention has been paid to the framing of the claims made by proponents of these technologies. Articulating the underlying problem representations and scrutinizing them can lead to new problem representations and more productive scientific strategies particularly in response to climate change by allowing responsibility to be collectively pursued ‘by design.’