WASHINGTON (AP) -- An article in Biblical Archaeology Review disputes claims that plant pollen embedded in the Shroud of Turin supports belief in the Italian relic as the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
Author Vaughn M. Bryant Jr., director of the pollen laboratory at Texas A&M University, says he and ''most other serious scientists'' will remain unconvinced until new pollen samples from the cloth are studied under stricter conditions.
In 1973 and 1978 the late Max Frei, director of the police laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, collected pollen grains embedded in the cloth, using a dozen pieces of sticky tape. He reported the presence of 54 plant species that occur only in Israel and Turkey.
Last year the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis published ''Flora of the Shroud of Turin,'' written by four U.S. and Israeli scientists who re-examined Frei's evidence and largely supported his conclusions.
However, Bryant writes that all the tests were inadequate because they used a conventional microscope, not a scanning electron microscope or transmission electron microscope that would provide more precise identifications of pollen species. He says Frei should have applied chemicals to remove surface coatings that obscure details of the pollen.
Bryant is also unimpressed by most of the faint plant images on the shroud, which believers think were somehow left by burial flowers.
Besides the botanical dispute, radiocarbon tests have dated the relic between A.D. 1272 and 1390, but believers contend those samples were contaminated and say authenticity remains possible.
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