In a meeting room in an industrial area of San Francisco, Matthew Markus unpacks the contents of a small carved wooden box that depicts a rhinoceros with an impressive horn. Inside it are vials containing powder and small, hard-looking chunks. There are also what looks like miniature horns. “I term it conservation 2.0,” says Markus.
Markus is the co-founder of Pembient, a startup that aims to thwart the illegal wildlife trade by recreating animal products in the lab. It is starting with rhino horn but has plans for more complex materials such as elephant tusk. The hope is to produce rhino horn so biologically similar to wild horn – but at about one tenth of black market costs – that buyers and illegal traders will switch, thereby curtailing relentlessly increasing poaching levels. The mysterious box contains Pembient’s collection of prototypes. “We are working towards a bio-identical product by reverse-engineering rhino horn down to the smallest degree,” says Markus, who claims his version can be better than the real thing. “Our goal is that the only way you can tell the difference is that there will be pollutants in the wild horn.”
Rhinos certainly need more help and the desperateness of the situation is inspiring other non-traditional ideas. “There is a need to innovate from outside,” says Markus. “Conservation 1.0 is a little antiquated.” As the wealth of the elite in Asian countries has risen, the cost of the horn, along with the frequency of poaching incidents, has increased rapidly. By weight, its price exceeds that of gold. It is prized, particularly in Vietnam and China, as a status symbol and for its supposed “medicinal” qualities , unsupported by science, which include preventing hangovers, reducing fever and detoxifying the body following cancer treatment.
In South Africa, which has the largest rhino population of any country, poaching is at an all-time high. Poachers took an average of three a day in 2014, up from one a month in 2007. Save the Rhino’s most recent figures put the number of southern white rhinos at 20,405. Just five northern white rhinos remain, all of which are either too old to reproduce or infertile. Black rhinos, on the critically endangered list, number just 5,055 and one subspecies is already extinct. Two of the three Asian species are also classed as critically endangered and number less than 100 animals each.
Pembient’s concept, which another company – Rhinoceros Horn LLC – is also pursuing a version of, has raised the hackles of conservation groups from the World Wildlife Foundation to the wildlife monitoring network Traffic. It panders to consumers’ behaviour rather than trying to change it, which could set back efforts to educate, they say. “There is general horror at the idea,” says Cathy Dean, international director of the UK-based charity Save the Rhino, which earlier this month issued a joint statement with the International Rhino Foundation opposing the synthetic horn. Dean adds that ersatz horn is unlikely to dent the market – if people can afford the real thing they are going to buy it – and rebukes the company for failing properly to consult conservation professionals on the idea first.
Markus sees things differently. The current approach – better law enforcement combined with demand-reduction campaigns – isn’t working, he argues and something needs to be done before it is too late. Just as there is faux fur, there should be a rhino horn alternative. “If people like the product they should be able to enjoy it without harming any animals. There is room for better, bio-identical substitutes,” he says.
That Pembient’s horn will come without the contaminants of modern life should actually make it more desirable than the real thing, Markus contends. Its horn won’t contain traces of pesticide, industrial chemicals or radioactivity from past nuclear incidents, which all make their way into the bodies of wild rhinos.
The idea to copy rhino horn first came to Markus, a software engineer, as an undergraduate student in the mid 1990s after reading an article about poaching. But the technology that could realise the notion hadn’t yet been developed and at the time rhino poaching was in decline after a surge that began in the 1970s. He shelved the thought until the late 2000s, when he saw poaching rates were again beginning to climb and the science of what was possible had shifted, along with the cost. “Eventually, I thought: let’s just step into the fray and see if we can change the direction of that trend line.” The company, co-founded with biochemist George Bonaci, was officially launched in January 2015. It is Seattle-based but for the past few months has been resident at San Francisco Indie Bio, an accelerator programme for new biotech startups which provides starter funding along with shared office and lab space.
Rhino horn is a non-living product made up primarily of keratin, the key component of hair, fingernails and animal hooves. Thus far, all Pembient’s prototypes use commercially sourced wool keratin, which is similar but not identical to that in rhino horn. But the plan is to engineer yeast cells to produce the exact same keratins that make up rhino horn, a similar approach to that being used to create new types of biofuels and drugs. By inserting a gene that codes for a rhino keratin into yeast, the fungus can be transformed into a rhino keratin production factory. Markus and Bonaci are currently in the process of homing in on the genes needed to generate the horn’s keratins by mining the genome of the southern white rhino – sequenced in 2012 – for suggestions. These are combined with analysis of the real black rhino horn they have access to for research (the company hopes also to gain access to a white rhino specimen).
Those rhino keratins then need to be amalgamated with other natural components of rhino horn, for example, trace elements such as sulphur, calcium and potassium, if the chemical composition is to be the same. “Our prototypes match rhino horn on several different spectrographic analyses,” says Markus. Also essential, and present in the newest prototypes, is a dash of rhino DNA.“The goal is that if you were to run a genetic test it would produce a fingerprint of a rhinoceros,” he adds. Pembient has two potential DNA sources: fragments could either be copied and amplified from the real rhino horn or chemically synthesised. As long as the product is labelled as made in a lab, no wildlife trade laws would be contravened, says Markus.
That material then becomes the “ink” used to print a horn in 3D. Among the 3D-printed prototypes he lays out is one in a petri dish that has been extruded upwards. Another, coated in a brown layer intended to resemble the so-called cornification layer on the horns, is made from a mould. Full-size horns are about 15 centimetres wide at the base and nearly 70 centimetres tall. Markus says it would be great to be able to print a full one, but also points out that a powdered product might be more useful. For consumption, it just gets ground down anyway. The whole process is being designed to be scalable, allowing for industrial quantities to be generated.
One thing in Pembient’s favour is that rhino horns have a relatively simple makeup, being solid all the way through. Sonja Boy, a scientist at the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University in Pretoria, South Africa, has studied the structure of rhino horn and found that it isn’t organised in hollow, straw-like structures as previously thought. “The cell layering is quite complex... but I think it would be easier to recreate than a structure with tubules,” she says.
Markus’s bullish belief that there will be a demand for the product is based on market research conducted in Vietnam earlier this year. Of a survey of 500 people who used rhino horn for medicinal purposes, while only 15% who said they would settle for water buffalo as a substitute, 45% said they would accept the manufactured horn instead. “This product would change at least some people’s habits,” says Markus. Whether powder or horn, he intends to bring the final product to market through partnerships for example with traditional medicine companies. It already has one deal lined up: based on its use as a hangover treatment, a craft brewery in Beijing is interested in making a beer infused with Pembient’s product. Markus expects the beer to be released in China this autumn.
Beyond Pembient, another novel idea to prevent rhinos being targeted is horn devaluation. The technique, being applied in South Africa, sees the horns of living rhinos infused with a toxin and a dye to make them unappealing to poachers. The toxin is intended to sicken humans who consume the horns – symptoms include nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting and convulsions – while the dye spoils the horn’s ornamental value. Several hundred rhinos, mostly on small private reserves, have been treated, with signs posted on perimeter fences to warn poachers off. Where the technique has been used it has reduced poaching, says Lorinda Hern, co-founder of the Rhino Rescue Project, which has pioneered it. But its scientific basis is contested. Rhino horn is solid, says Boy, so the chemicals wouldn’t be able to travel through and contaminate it. “Ways to save the rhino population need to be based on good science, otherwise it risks setting conservation efforts back.”
Supercomputers are also being combined with drones to catch poachers. The US-based Lindbergh Foundation is spearheading an initiative – starting in South Africa – that will use predictive software developed by the University of Maryland to direct the drones to where the animals and the poachers are likely to be. For a particular game park, the software produces a flight plan considering factors including historical data about animal movement, topography, water locations and season to predict their location. Rangers can then be pre-positioned to catch the poachers. Both the drones, which have infrared sensors so they can operate at night when most poaching occurs, and the software have been tested independently. The plan now, says John L Petersen, the foundation’s chairman, is to test them together before a wider roll-out when fundraising is finished. Anti-poaching drones have been tested before, says Petersen, but they haven’t been successful, getting lost and crashing. Well-trained operators are needed. But Save the Rhino’s Cathy Dean is sceptical. The programme also needs well-equipped rangers on the ground and many lack the basics such as boots and tents.
One thing is clear: in the fight to save the rhino, any proposed technological solution needs critical attention. But the new ideas may at least generate more thinking about how to tackle the problem. “For better or worse,” says Markus, “we are changing the conversation.”
Wild ideas: Hi-tech conservation projects
■ Startup Afineur is trying to cut civets out of civet coffee, the luxury beverage that uses beans eaten, digested and collected from the faeces of farmed Asian palm civets. “It’s the foie gras of coffee,” co-founder Camille Delebecque told Wired. To recreate the smooth flavour, the company is fermenting the beans in the lab and hopes to have the product on sale by the end of the year.
■ A handheld, battery-powered DNA barcoder that could allow identification of unrecognisable animal or plant samples in minutes for a few pennies. That is one of the goals of Conservation X Labs, which says the device will help protect biodiversity. It also plans to launch Con X Con, a conference for those trying to “dramatically transform” the field of conservation through new technology and innovations.
■ Cloning to save endangered animals isn’t a new concept, but success so far has been pretty limited. Living cells of the northern white rhino have been cryopreserved by the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research and could, in theory, be converted to stem cells that could develop into sperm and eggs to be combined by IVF and the embryo implanted into a surrogate. The first step the zoo is taking is to sequence the animal’s genome.
■ Want to meet a passenger pigeon or a woolly mammoth? Using genetic technologies, scientists are also trying to resurrect long-extinct species. “Signs are, there will be some impressive milestones in this decade,” says Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, which runs the de-extinction initiative, on the project’s website. He expects the revived species will be nearly identical genetically and able to take up their old role in ecosystems.
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