Who was Raymond Rogers

Raymond Rogers (1927-2005), a retired chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with a long and distinguished scientific career. He had been honored as a Fellow of the prestigious Los Alamos lab, part of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), once the home of the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. In his home state of New Mexico, Rogers had been a charter member of the Coalition for Excellence in Science Education. For several years, he served on the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board as a civilian with the rank equivalency of Lieutenant General. He had published over fifty peer-reviewed scientific papers in science journals. He was also a member of the skeptical organization, New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR).  See organization statement.

In 1978, Rogers had been selected as one of many scientists asked to go to Turin and study the shroud up and close. From his work on the shroud, Rogers’ only substantive conclusion was that the shroud images were not painted. He did not then offer an opinion on its authenticity. Following the carbon dating, he accepted the conclusion that the shroud was medieval. He had complete respect for the technology and the quality of work done by the carbon dating labs. In 2005, the same year that the student in Alaska contacted me, Philip Ball, a former editor of Nature, that most prestigious international journal of science, wrote in Nature Online that Rogers “has a history of respectable work on the shroud dating back to 1978, when he became director of chemical research for the international Shroud of Turin Research Project.”

Kim Johnson of NMSR wrote in an obituary for Rogers on the organization’s web site:

He was a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and tried to be an excellent, open minded scientist in all things. In particular, he had no pony in the "Shroud of Turin" horserace, but was terribly interested in making sure that neither proponents nor skeptics let their scientific judgment be clouded by their preconceptions. He just wanted to date and analyze the thing. He died on March 8th from cancer. He was a good man, and tried his best to do honest science.

Though Rogers had stopped doing research on the shroud, he had maintained a passing interest, in part because no one had figured out how the images had been made. However, he was annoyed by claims from those who thought they could explain away the carbon dating with pseudoscientific or non-scientific explanations. They were, in his words, the “lunatic fringe” of shroud research.

One hypothetical suggestion, seemingly off the wall, was gaining traction, particularly on the Internet. Two researchers, Sue Benford and Joe Marino, were suggesting that the sample used in the carbon dating was significantly not part of the shroud but instead part of a medieval repair, a section of the cloth mended using a technique known as invisible reweaving. Rogers thought this was ludicrous, just so much more lunatic fringe thinking. He thought that he could prove they were wrong. He had in his possession some small thread samples taken from the shroud at a spot adjacent to where the carbon dating sample had been snipped away. It would be a simple matter to show that there was no evidence of mending.

As it turned out, Benford and Marino seemed to be onto something. In 2002, after considerable research, Rogers, along with Anna Arnoldi, a chemistry professor at the University of Milan, wrote a paper that strongly suggested that Benford and Marino were right. More work needed to be done, however, and Rogers continued to study the matter with material that had been saved from the actual cuttings from which the carbon dating samples were taken. In January, 2005, following a lengthy peer-review process, Thermochimica Acta, an international journal from Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, published a paper by Rogers entitled, “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin.” In it Rogers wrote:

The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.

This wasn’t religious opinion. In fact, it wasn’t that much of a scientific opinion of the sort that newspapers and television like. If Rogers could have proven that the shroud was the genuine article or at least that it came from the time of Christ, this would have been exciting news. As it was he was only saying that for all practical purposes the 1988 carbon dating was meaningless. Nonetheless, this was pure science. It was also a personal admission that he had been wrong in thinking that the carbon dating was the end of the story; that it was fake. In a letter to the editors of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, in response to criticisms leveled at him by Joe Nickell, one of the magazine’s non-scientist columnists who had raised questions about Rogers’ scientific competence, Rogers wrote:

I accepted the radiocarbon results, and I believed that the "invisible reweave" claim was highly improbable. I used my samples to test it. One of the greatest embarrassments a scientist can face is to have to agree with the lunatic fringe. . . . Joe [Nickell] did not understand the method or importance of the results of the pyrolysis/mass spectrometry analyses, and I doubt that he understands the fundamental science behind either visible/ultraviolet spectrometry or fluorescence. He certainly does not understand chemical kinetics. If he wants to argue my results, I suggest that we stick to observations, natural laws, and facts. I am a skeptic by nature, but I believe all skeptics should be held to the same ethical and scientific standards we require of others.