How do you handle the data of a scientist who violates all the norms of his field? Who breaches the trust of a community that spans the entire globe? Who shows a casual disregard for the fate of the whole human species?

On the one hand, you might want to learn from such a person’s work; to have a full and open dissection of everything that went wrong. Because, spoiler, there was a lot that went wrong in the case in question. But rewarding such “abhorrent” behavior, as one scientist put it, with a publication—the currency of the scientific world—would send a message that ethical rules only exist to be broken.

This is the precarious situation in which we find ourselves today, as scientists hash out the next chapter of the human gene-editing scandal that erupted two weeks ago, when the Chinese scientist He Jiankui revealed that for the last two years he has been working in secret to produce the world’s first Crispr-edited babies. Scientists denounced the work with near-unanimous condemnation, citing its technical failures as well as its deep breaches of ethical (and possibly legal) lines. What’s much less certain is what should happen to the work, now that it’s been done.

Hours after He presented data on the twin girls at an international genome editing summit in Hong Kong, copies of his slides were already circulating in email inboxes and on Twitter. Scientists scrutinized the work, 280 characters at a time, and pointed out all the questions that remained unanswered. It was the kind of conversation that normally would take place under the auspices of a journal. But He, who made his announcement over YouTube, has so far produced no manuscript for public consumption. A paper describing this work is reportedly under peer review, and a second one about additional Crispr experiments in human embryos was rejected by an international journal over ethical and scientific concerns, STAT reported Monday morning.

LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Crispr

Scientists are beginning to grapple with the very real possibility that He’s work may never be awarded publication status, along with its attendant sheen of legitimacy. And that may be the academic justice he deserves. But it also highlights an intractable tension embedded in scientific publishing: policing bad actors comes at the cost of scientific censorship.

“It’s a very dicey issue,” says Michael Eisen, a molecular biologist at University of California, Berkeley, and a staunch advocate of open-access publishing. “There need to be consequences for people who do things that are deemed to be unethical. You don’t want to have a system that gives people reasons to just randomly experiment on people.”

The scientific publishing system, imperfect as it may be, has remained relevant in an era where anyone can buy a URL, self-publish a paper, and push it out to social media platforms reaching millions of people all in the span of an afternoon. The reason is that data wants to be seen in context, in conversation with other data. Through the connective tissue of citations, scientific journals establish a common set of vetted facts to debate, challenge, and be inspired by. They ensure some modicum of permanence to those facts; so that people today, tomorrow, and 100 years into the future can all point to the same digital object identifier assigned at publication and know that they’re all talking about the same thing.

What then are the scientific costs to building a foundation for the field of human germline editing with one very consequential brick conspicuously missing? Disappearing the data down a memory hole presents logistical challenges as well as philosophical ones. Does the original sin of He Who Must Not Be Named preclude society from studying these twin babies as they grow up and maybe have children of their own? Addressing these questions will require decoupling the knowledge-building purpose of scientific publishing from the career-building one.