Microanalytical great, Walter C. McCrone, dies - News and Comment - Obituary

Walter C. McCrone--world-famous microanalyst, CSICOP fellow, and Shroud of Turin nemesis-died July 10, 2002, at the age of 86.

McCrone's distinguished career included a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Cornell in 1942, and several years work as a microscopist at what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 1956 he became an independent consultant and founded his now-famous Research Associates. In 1960 he founded his complementary organization, the McCrone Research Institute, which would eventually teach more than 20,000 "students," including forensic analysts from the FBI and other crime laboratories. He also founded a similar facility in London, McCrone Scientific, and created the international journal The Microscope. Perhaps his most lasting contribution will prove to be his multivolume work, The Particle Atlas, a massive compilation of photomicrographs of various substances to aid in their identification.

Although much of McCrone Associates' work involved industrial matters, they also became renowned for their forensic expertise. For example, they were decisive in a criminal case when they matched a tiny bullet fragment, taken from the left hand of the accused murderer, with an area missing from the fatal bullet. The evidence supported the defendant's claim of a struggle, and he was set free.

McCrone's expertise solved many historical mysteries. He determined from a lock of Beethoven's hair that the composer died of lead poisoning; similarly, he found that Napoleon Bonaparte had not been poisoned with arsenic as some had theorized. McCrone discovered that the Vinland Map, purporting to show that Leif Ericson had visited America some five centuries before Columbus, had traces of anatase, a pigment not synthesized until about 1920.

McCrone was employed by art galleries around the world to authenticate--or not--various paintings attributed to old masters, but he is perhaps best known for having proved the notorious Shroud of Turin a fake. He identified red ocher and vermilion pigments and a tempera binding medium on the cloth, consistent with the reported confession of a fourteenth-century artist. For his efforts he was, he said, "drummed out" of the pro-Shroud group that had commissioned his analyses, but he was vindicated in 1988 when radiocarbon dating verified that the cloth was manufactured between 1260 and 1390.

Although he had received many awards (for example, from the American Microchemical Society in 1970 and the Criminalistics Section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 1984), in 2000 the American Chemical Society honored him for his pioneering work in chemical microscopy. The society specifically cited his analytical work on the Shroud of Turin.

McCrone is survived by his wife--the former Lucy Beman whom he married in 1957--an accomplished microscopist in her own right.

McCrone's motto was at once both serious and witty: "Think small." It seems also appropriately ironic for one who will be remembered as a giant in his field.

Joe Nickell is CSICOP's Senior Research Fellow.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
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