In today’s installment of “hey please don’t do that,” the Wall Street Journal reports that a clandestine startup named Preventive is trying to usher in the first known birth of a genetically-modified baby outside China.

First, a little background on human gene-hacking, also known as germline gene editing. On top of being wildly unethical — and we’re talking Frankenstein levels here — human gene-editing has also been strictly prohibited in the US by an act of Congress. However, and this is a huge caveat, the congressional ban only affects research done with federal funds, meaning privately-funded germline gene editing is technically allowed, though anyone caught doing it runs the risk of becoming a pariah in the scientific community.

In genetics circles, anxiety over germline gene editing

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