Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Max Frei thought so.

Max Frei

Max Frei thought so. He thought pollen spores imbedded in the cloth might be used to determine where the cloth had been.

Frei was a highly respected criminalist who had headed up the Zurich Police Scientific Laboratory for many years. He retired in 1972 but continued to work as a consultant. The year after he retired and again in 1978, he was given the opportunity to take some sample dust from the surface of the shroud for examination. The dust was visible to the naked eye but it would take a microscope to see what was in that dust. Modern forensic science was about to meet the shroud, to look for trace evidence that might tell something of its provenance.

When Frei started his career shortly after World War II, police science labs were relatively new. Only sixteen years earlier, the United States Bureau of Investigation had set up a one-room technical laboratory in temporary space in Old Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C. The lab’s one and only scientist, Special Agent Charles Appel, had equipped the lab with a microscope borrowed from Bausch and Lomb, an ultraviolet light for detecting blood, a special device for examining gun barrels and a small photographic darkroom setup that was less sophisticated then the home darkrooms of many pre-war hobbyists. In 1942, the same year that Max Frei started at the newly created Zurich lab, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the technical laboratory was christened the FBI Crime Laboratory. But it was still a small laboratory, one of very few labs in the newly evolving field of forensic science.

By 1973, forensics science was a well developed field with many specialties. Skilled technicians at the FBI lab were matching finger prints found at crime scenes to vast card files of fingerprint records.  They were matching typewriters to typed documents. They were matching teeth to dental records. Chemists were analyzing paper and ink, blood and all manner of substances. Microscopists were identifying trace evidence; tiny bits of plants and animals and minerals, bits of stuff so small that it could only be seen with optical microscopes or a relatively new device called the scanning electron microscope. The SEM scans tiny objects with a beam of electrons rather than by magnifying the light reflected from or passing through a specimen. A common method of collecting trace evidence was to use clear, adhesive tape pressed to a surface, a technique that the annals of forensic science usually credits to Max Frei in 1950.