Jay Ingram, writing in the Toronto Star, discusses a topic with which I was not familiar. Ingram interviewed Clint Chapple, a biochemist at Purdue University, and Malcolm Campbell, a botanist at the University of Toronto. Chapple points out that it was odd that Rogers used a powerful and precise technique, pyrolysis mass spectrometry, to assess the carbohydrates in the cloth, but didn't choose to apply that technique to the vanillin. This was odd because the incredible accuracy of this technique as applied to vanillin is scientifically well-documented. "I've published using this method and have this instrument in my own lab. The method would have easily revealed the presence (or absence) of degradation products like vanillin had the author been seriously interested in testing his hypothesis," Chapple says. Instead, Rogers used a staining technique that reveals the presence of vanillin if you get a color change. But this is a qualitative, not a quantitative test.
That's rich. I took five minutes to google pyrolysis mass spec shroud and came up with this:
Note that this is directly from Rogers at Los Alamos.
The pyrolysis mass spec was not done primarily to check vanillin, but to look for paint!
I quote the relevant paragraph:
The method was sufficiently sensitive to detect traces of the low-molecular-weight fractions (oligomers) of the polyethylene bag that Prof. Luigi Gonella had used to wrap the Raes threads. It did not detect any unexpected pyrolysis fragments that indicated any Shroud materials other than carbohydrates. That is exactly what would be expected from a piece of pure linen. This helped confirm the fact that the image was not painted.
The paper goes on to give specific chemical details about the types of paints which could have been used, including red and yellow ochre, charcoal, tempera, and oil paints.
How could you refer to Rogers' pyrolysis mass spec and use it to 'refute' presence of vanillin, but NEGLECT TO MENTION THE MAIN POINT OF THE PAPER ???? T.W.N.F.P. !! (There was *no* f'ing paint!)
Nice try, troll.
Now go home and reload and then shoot yourself in the other foot.
Cheers!
If you'd bothered to read the link I supplied, you'd find that the discussion was of a paper called "Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin" published by Raymond Rogers in 2005. Vanillin, for example, is nowhere mentioned in this new article. As for this article, one major problem that I see with it from the getgo is that he uses "contaminated" fibers left over from McCrone's research, but only after they were "laboriously cleaned and prepared" by his wife. McCrone studied it prior to Mrs. Rogers' "laborious" cleaning and found paint pigments, something Rogers weirdly doesn't mention, and given the criticisms of his later paper for faulty and non-serious methodology you may take it for whatever you think it's worth.