Did a bioplastic growth on the fibers cause an error in the carbon 14 dating?
Certainly not! There have been claims that a biological polymer was growing on the Shroud and that this could have affected the date. This “theory” has received a lot of play in books about the ST and in many magazine articles. It is repeated on dozens of web sites. The National Science Foundation Mass Spectrometry Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska, using highly sensitive pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, could not detect any such polymers on Shroud fibers. Furthermore, it is well known that a biopolymer product would show the same carbon age as the Shroud because the organism, as it grew and formed, would use fixed carbon from the cellulose fibers and not from the atmosphere. Nonetheless, the argument involving bioplastic growth persists. One reason is that ancient textiles that have been grossly misdated, especially in the earliest days of radiocarbon testing, and some suspect it is because of bioplastic growths. Most notable of these is mummy 1770 of the British Museum,
