After my reaction to Michael Price, cazab wrote to remind me that “. . . regarding Garlaschelli, Fanti and Heimburger have recently published a ‘Letter to the Editor’ in the Journal of Imaging Science and Technology.”
It is in the March/April issue of JIST. It is a three page letter with twenty referenced documents and several images. You may want to obtain a copy: Fanti G., Heimburger T., "Letter to the Editor Comments on ‘Life-Size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and Its Image’ by L. Garlaschelli", Journal of Imaging Science and Technology, Vol. 55, 2, March/April 2011, pp. 020102-(3). JIST charges $20.00 if you are not a subscriber.
Garlaschelli failed: The reason is simple. Garlaschelli only considered some of the shroud’s image attributes and included some serious factual errors:
[A] misunderstanding arises which seems due to the fact that Garlaschelli considered only some aspects of the TS image but not all. Particularly, Garlaschelli does not consider the important facts detected through the microscope on the TS as . . . For these reasons the present authors do not agree with Garlaschelli’s conclusions which state, “The most likely explanation, in our opinion, is that the image, as it can be seen today, is a chemical etching of the cellulose of the linen fibers.” First of all . . . the cellulose of the TS fibers is not colored; the color does not penetrate into the fiber but it is found only as a 0.2-micron-thick thin layer at the surface of the fiber. Second etching colors the whole cellulose of a linen fiber, and it is for this reason that . . . etching seems not to be a reliable hypothesis for the explanation of the body image formation on the TS.
The letter goes on to correct several factual errors in Garlaschelli’s paper. Among them, these two:
1. “[In 1973] …Standard forensic (both chemical and microscopic) tests for blood were all negative; instead, particles of a red pigment, …were found.” It should be stated that, according to the final report itself, these tests were “not positive” but not “negative” in the sense that no definitive proof could be given because of the lack of solubility of the red material. A few years later instead, during the STURP examinations, the blood was found to be real human blood by about 15 tests including spectroscopy, microchemistry, and immunology.
3. Regarding the C14 dating, “…the linen used to make the Shroud had been harvested somewhere between 1260 and 1390 C.E.10” Garlaschelli should also consider a more recent result11 that put in discussion, from a statistical point of view the results published in Ref. 10, as well as the published papers showing strong anomalies in the C14 dated “corner.”
Near the end of the three page letter, Fanti and Heimburger make these important points:
Finally, the proven fact that there is no image color under the blood stains on the TS, which demonstrated that the blood was first on the linen and prevented the formation of the image in those areas, remains very difficult to understand in any hypothesis involving a forger (including Garlaschelli’s hypothesis).
Incidentally, from Garlaschelli himself (personal email to the second author), there is, as expected, no fluorescent halo around his “blood stains” made of pigments, contrary to the serum haloes present on the TS.
We therefore conclude that the TS image was not produced by the technique proposed by Garlaschelli and still remains not reproducible.
The letter is signed:
—Giulio Fanti, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Padua, Via Venezia 1, 35137 Padova – Italy, E-mail: giulio.fanti@unipd.it
—Thibault Heimburger MD, Member of Shroud Science Group, 93200 Saint-Denis, France, E-mail: hthib@free.fr