Science Q: Can We Make Synthetic Tusks?

Dickinson Professor of Craniofacial Biology at King’s College London, who recently helped develop a method to replace teeth with cells from a person’s own gums.

Elephant tusks are modified teeth—which contain mineralized tissues, dentine, and enamel—and it’s theoretically possible to make a lab-grown tooth “if the right cells could be obtained,” Sharpe said.

“But, as with all organs, size comes from time,” he cautioned. “To grow something the size of even a small tusk would be impossible in the lab, because increased size requires increased nutrients and oxygen that are normally provided by the bloodstream.”

Rhino horns are markedly different than tusks: They’re made of keratin, like our fingernails, horse hooves, and porcupine quills. Since consumers of rhino horn in Asia typically use it as a medicinal powder, some other form of keratin could be used as a replacement powder, he noted.

But some conservationists don’t think synthetics will help the larger problem of wildlife trade.

“Whether a synthetic can be produced or not, we do not agree with perpetuating the idea of rhino horn as medicine,” Kathleen Garrigan of the African Wildlife Foundation in an email Garrigan said that rhino horn has not been shown to have any curative power.

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