by Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | June 26, 2015 06:11am ET
A new company is engineering a synthetic rhino horn that could be indistinguishable from the natural kind.
The goal is to flood the black market for rhino horn, which is prized in some parts of Asia for its purported medicinal value, according to the company, called Pembient.
By decreasing the amount of money the horn fetches, the company founders hope to reduce the incentive for poachers in Africa to kill rhinos. As part of the process, scientists at the company are also sequencing the genome of the black rhino, which could help conservationists and basic scientists learn more about the imperiled creatures.
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