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The following was copied from Linda Moulton Howe's web site: earthfiles.com
which are excerpts from her interview with Dr Adler on May 23, 1999 regarding the stains on the shroud:
Question: "What do you mean when you say you did an immunological test?"
Answer: "It means that you take something that is antigenic and you put it into an animal that is not human -- a rabbit, an egg, something - and you make an antibody to it. You then take the protein or the mixture that you want to test and see if you get what is called an antibody antigen reaction. There's all sorts of ways to find out if this is positive. Sometimes it's tagged with material. Sometimes you look for a precipitate. Sometimes you look for what is called an agglutination test. I won't go into all those kinds of details, but what you are looking for is you've got some kind of material and you want to see if you can get a reaction to the so-called antibody which has been developed in another system. All right, now you have two kinds of problems here. One, there are kinds of things because they're genetically similar will also give a response. So, if I say I have a positive test for human antibody, you get the same thing from chimp, from gorilla, from orangutan. And unless you run a very specific test, you have no way to tell the difference. You certainly don't in the kinds of materials we are testing on the Shroud. The other kind of thing you have is -- what are the kinds of things that serve as antigens? There are two types of material that serve as antigens: one are proteins. These are what we call polypeptides. The other thing is that there are a lot of proteins that we call glycol proteins. These are proteins that at one end of the protein have a long stretch of what we think of as poly sugar, saccharide The most common test we think of to test somebody's blood type are for proteins where what's being identified is not any of the protein structure, but the sugar structure. The problem is those kinds of polysaccharides are frequently found as contaminants in bacterial cell walls. And so, if you have a material that you're not sure is free of bacterial contaminants, you may get a positive test that has nothing to do with the presence of the protein you're looking for. Unfortunately the blood type proteins, the common ones, and the globin that Dr. Baima Bollone tested fall in that class. So, a lot of people said he was looking at bacterial cell wall debris."
Question: "And this was for the AB negative test?"
Answer: "This was for the AB Negative test. (Torino, Italy in 1981, reported AB Negative blood type on Shroud blood stain.) And that's when I decided if I was going to repeat an immunological test, I would test for one that did NOT have a glyco group attached. That's serum albumin, that's very specific. And I would test for whole blood. This is everything that's in there, in the serum. This is hemoglobin, albumin, everything. And that would sort of confirm that my albumin test, the control on it. So, I ran those two tests and both of those were positive. Well, those two tests coupled with his (Dr. Bollone's) two tests make it very clear we have a right to say that we have taken blood samples from the Shroud of Turin, two different investigators, and shown clear cut evidence that there is certainly some type of primate blood in those samples. And that's being very cautious. Anybody who did work on anything other than the Shroud of Turin would simply say that you tested for human and you found it. I also ran chimp controls. And in fact, the chimp control was just a little bit weaker in this surface precipitant fluorescence test I ran than the human sample. And so, I'm not in a rush to say -- it was human. But if you press me, I tell people, 'Well, look at the image it was taken from. If you think this is a shaved orangutan, go ahead!' Most people would not hesitate to say what we got is positive human test."
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