In May 2015, The Guardian published one of the first pieces of mainstream press coverage about Pembient, the bioengineering startup founded by Matthew Markus and biochemist George Bonaci. The piece profiled the company during its earliest months, when the team was operating out of IndieBio's San Francisco lab space and producing its first rhino horn prototypes from commercially sourced wool keratin.
The article captures the tension that would define the story for the next decade. Markus describes the project as "Conservation 2.0," arguing that conventional enforcement and demand-reduction campaigns had failed to slow the poaching crisis. Conservation groups, including Save the Rhino and the International Rhino Foundation, publicly opposed the approach, arguing that synthetic substitutes would reinforce demand rather than reduce it.
The case for Pembient's approach rested on a piece of market research that the company had commissioned in Vietnam that year. In a survey of 500 people who used rhino horn for medicinal purposes, only 15 percent said they would accept water buffalo horn as a substitute. But 45 percent said they would accept a bio-identical, lab-grown horn instead.
That gap, between what the existing conservation strategies assumed about consumer behavior and what the market was actually signaling, is the gap the film lives inside.
"For better or worse, we are changing the conversation."
Matthew Markus, The Guardian, May 2015
Markus is quoted on what would later become a central thread of the film: the idea that a lab-grown product, designed to be bio-identical at the genetic level, could be more desirable than wild horn precisely because it would be free of the industrial and environmental contaminants that accumulate in wild animals.
At the time the piece was published, Pembient had one commercial partnership announced, a craft brewery in Beijing planning to release a beer infused with their product, based on rhino horn's traditional use as a hangover remedy. The company's larger bet, on traditional medicine companies and the beauty clinics of Hanoi, was still ahead.
