Dr Zugibe, the heart specialist, asserts that the tissue was a snapshot of active human cell behaviour. It was evidence of life, not death. And yet what the professor is describing is tissue on a slide, prepared and fixed five years earlier after having been in water for more than three years. This means that until the tissue was fixed as a slide, it must have remained as living tissue. Why does Professor Zugibe say it was alive? Because white blood cells, particularly the clearly visible, intact, polymorphonuclear leukocytes, cannot survive outside of a body for more than a few minutes before disintegrating. Indeed the entire life span of white blood cells is a short cycle of days even when in a living body when they are actively addressing trauma in a tissue.
Dr Zugibe’s assessment of the good state of preservation of the white blood cells and the muscle tissue was what might have been expected if they had been placed in a preservative like formalin. But the liquid substance in which the material sampled had been kept was analysed by Dr Thomas Loy of Queensland University on 30 August 2001 following which he reported, “No organic odour was detected that might be associated with histological fixing chemicals (commonly, alcohol, xylene, formaldehyde). The refractive index of the fluid was compared with water and known standards and determined to be essentially that of water.”
Biology textbooks will tell you that all tissue, but particularly white blood cells, dissolves and disintegrates readily when placed in water. Osmotic pressure on cells placed in distilled water is higher than tap water and more detrimental to their longevity. Dr Zugibe confirms “it would be impossible for the white blood cells to be present in the sample if the sample had been kept in water” and that, “if this tissue had been placed in water it would normally have broken down within one week.” Yet what he sees in his microscope is heart tissue with white blood cells that was in water for more than three years and yet still presented as vital. Dr Zugibe’s assessment of the white blood cells accords with textbook analysis of what occurs to blood cells if left in distilled water. By osmosis water moves into the cells which then swell and explode, undergoing cell lysis, meaning cell destruction, which essentially means they, or even remnants of what once were cells, would be very difficult to find under a microscope.
Zugibe not only identifies tissue, he examines it forensically to provide an historical account, a picture of what recently transpired in the heart from which the tissue is only an extract. He provides a timeframe. He interprets what he sees and provides and educated evaluation of what happened in the life of that ‘person’. This ‘person’ experienced cardiac trauma two or three days earlier. Dr Zugibe could date the event that compromised the blood supply to the heart by the presentation of the tissue itself and by the process of immune response underway.
Not only was the person ‘alive at the time the sample was taken’ but this person had a particular medical history because this particular heat tissue revealed, 'degenerative changes consistent with a recent myocardial infraction of a few days duration…due to an obstruction of a coronary artery that supplies nutrients and oxygen to an area of heart muscle. This obstruction may be the result of atherosclerosis or a coronary thrombosis or," said Dr Zugibe, “a severe blow to the chest over the heart.”
Clearly questions about the phenomenon are more complicated than simply asking how someone could have had access to a locked tabernacle and manipulated a piece of bread so that it transformed into what appears to be human tissue. Had someone say a surgeon or a murderer, sliced off a small piece of heart tissue from the left ventricle in the vicinity of the valve from a living person and then dropped it into the bowl of water with the wafer, how could he have then engineered it to be progressively embedded in the host so that it was of one substance with the wafer? How could he have ensured it’s continuing transformation whilst securely locked away? How could he have defied and altered the natural rates of decomposition for white blood cells and kept the white blood cells alive for longer then a few minutes? Indeed how could he have defied the physical laws of entropy and decay and kept the white cells alive for three years in water, cells which under normal circumstances would not last for more than a few minutes? How would he have engineered his hoax so that it was it was identified as laboratory analysis as clearly containing human DNA yet stubbornly resistant to yielding his ‘victim’s’ DNA profile? How would he have maintained an ongoing process of tissue activity (inflammation) in a disembodied piece of heart whilst transporting it from a theoretical corpse/murder victim to the glass bowl of the tabernacle? How could he have that process of life continue after placing the tissue in water? And since no human could survive having a piece of his heart removed one has to ask where the remainder of the heart is? And morbidly, where is the body?
