How old is the Turin Shroud?
New evidence has reopened the debate on radiocarbon dating of the relic
When I joined the editorial team of Nature in 1988, I quickly discovered what a lively, controversy-riven place it was to be working. There was, for example, the ‘memory of water’ paper that year, followed by the ‘cold fusion’ fracas a year later. But few Nature papers from that era have remained such a cause of dispute as the one published in 1989 on radiocarbon dating of the Turin Shroud.