Secondo Pia’s photographic negative sparked a global interest in the Shroud — and competing claims of a religious miracle and a photographic hoax.

Almost immediately, scientists and researchers around the world began to study the Shroud.

One scientist named Yves Delage, at the Sorbonne University in Paris, examined the body image and described it as “flawless” right down to the details — including signs of rigor mortis, when a body’s muscles stiffen after death for up to 40 hours. His team concluded the linen had come in contact with an actual dead body. Delage himself said the probability that the image on the Shroud was NOT Jesus was 1 in 10 billion.

In 1950, Dr. Pierre Barbet, a prominent French surgeon, published his book “A Doctor at Calvary,” which documented 15 years of medical research on the Shroud image. Dr. Barbet described the Shroud as “anatomically perfect.”

In the 1970s, Swiss forensic microscopist Dr. Max Frei used sticky tape to take samples of dust from the Shroud. These samples contained pollen grains, fragments of plant fibers, fungal spores, and mineral particles. Dr. Frei identified pollen from 58 different types of plants, 38 of which grow in Jerusalem and not in Europe. He also discovered various micro-particle traces of the mineral aragonite, with impurities like that of aragonite found in caves around Jerusalem.

These scientists opened the door for the most extensive testing ever done on the Shroud in 1978.