The responsible research warning
Ellis opens by situating the critique in the synthetic biology community's decade‑long effort to embed Responsible Research and Innovation into education, funding, and startups. He points out that DARPA, Singularity University, UK government programs, and university‑based accelerators all now require RRI engagement. IndieBio, he says, is the exception, and that makes it more dangerous because its companies are application‑focused and media‑visible.
He presses Bethencourt to name IndieBio's RRI educator or collaborator and to describe what RRI content the accelerator provides.
"I get the feeling from your replies on Twitter that the answers aren't actually there, and I expect most people see straight through those answers too."
Why the horn idea keeps failing
Ellis says he has heard the synthetic rhino horn concept twice before in the past three years, once from students and once from an artist‑entrepreneur. In both cases, the idea lasted "about 5 minutes" once it was put to RRI experts who engage with WWF and Greenpeace.
The problem is not that Pembient's founders are not smart or well‑meaning. It is that they cannot go into this "legitimately without the full weight of people like WWF behind them." His guess is that they have not done that engagement yet and are instead doing the startup thing of promoting the idea online and in interviews without input from the people who matter.
This is the foundational tension: Pembient is moving at startup speed, marketing the concept to investors and the press, while conservation operates on stakeholder-consensus timelines that can take years.
What conservationists are already saying
Ellis notes that rhino conservationists are already taking to Twitter to complain directly to Pembient that the work will "inadvertently legitimize illegal trade and make natural rhino horn more exclusive." That is exactly the kind of blowback that RRI processes are designed to anticipate and address before public rollout, not after complaints start rolling in.
He contrasts Pembient's approach with what he sees as a decent conservation‑synbio example: Amyris identifying a molecule currently sourced through "barbaric" shark slaughter, providing it at lower cost and thereby letting the company profit while wild animal killing recedes. In that case, a specific active molecule was identified.
For rhino horn, Ellis says, no one has yet identified what active molecule is in the horn that is better than a non‑rhino substitute like Tylenol. Until that is known, he cannot see how a Western company can "legitimately make a product without inflaming the situation."
"I'm yet to hear from any scientist what active molecule(s) are within rhino horn that are better than a non‑Rhino substitute (e.g., Tylenol)."
An alternative path Ellis proposes
He suggests that, instead of making and selling a substitute, Pembient could work with charities and international experts to determine whether there are any genuine medicinal molecules in horn. That would be a "cool angle of synbio, learn by building," and would give the project scientific and conservation legitimacy before going to market.
In other words: do the research, publish it, engage stakeholders, and then decide whether a product makes sense, rather than launching a product and hoping stakeholders come around. This is the path that Pembient would then embark on for years afterward, trying to get the stakeholders of the environmental protection section to buy in.
How this fit Pembient's trajectory
This email arrived in February 2015, right as Pembient was finishing the IndieBio program and starting to attract media attention. Ellis's critique is clear: engage WWF and major conservation stakeholders from day one, or the project will fail.
Pembient took the advice seriously. Over the following years, Matthew Markus sought meetings with every major conservation NGO that would talk to him. He approached WWF, Save the Rhino, the International Rhino Foundation, and others, trying to explain the substitution strategy and make the economic case that flooding the market with cheap synthetic horn would crater poaching incentives.
In almost every instance, he was either dismissed outright or blocked from making his full case. The conservation establishment had already decided that synthetic horn would legitimize demand, create new markets, and make enforcement harder. Press releases from Save the Rhino, the International Rhino Foundation, and a coalition of 26 conservation groups publicly condemned Pembient, calling on the U.S. government to halt the project under the Rhinoceros and Tiger Conservation Act.
Markus took the fight all the way to CITES, appealing directly to international regulators at the 2016 Conference of the Parties in Johannesburg. That is where the NGO opposition became most visible. Conservation groups dominated the floor, testimonies, and side events, and Pembient's case was drowned out by coordinated institutional resistance.
This email is from the moment Pembient was told what would be required to make the project work within the existing conservation ecosystem. Markus tried to meet that standard, but the doors stayed closed. What Horn Maker captures is that struggle in real time: the insider coordination, the refusal to engage on the merits, and the power asymmetry between a two‑person biotech startup and a global network of conservation NGOs with decades of institutional access.
