From 1987 until 1992 he served on the Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board with the equivalent rank of Lt. General and received a Distinguished Service Award.
Other honors included being named a Tour Speaker for the American Chemical Society in 1971, the Los Alamos National Laboratory Distinguished Performance Award in 1984, and the Department of the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Medal in 1991.
They add that the variance of the C-14 results of the three labs falls outside the bounds of the Pearson's chi-square test, so that some additional explanation should be sought for the discrepancy.
Because he knew he had terminal cancer, he contacted his friend and fellow STURP researcher Barrie Schwortz to record interviews, etc.
Schwortz reexamined false-color x-ray fluorescent photographs of the Shroud taken by STURP and pointed out that the sample for radiocarbon dating was taken from the only section that showed up green, indicating it had different chemical properties from the rest of the Shroud, but no one had previously paid attention to the color difference because the green portion is from a section that does not contain part of the image.
In December 2008, the Discovery Channel in the United States presented a documentary titled Unwrapping the Shroud: New Evidence, containing a detailed explanation of the repair and footage of Schwortz and of Rogers discussing their new findings.
[9] The essential conclusion of the article is that the radiocarbon datings were accurate, but because the samples were from cloth that was not part of the original Shroud, they are irrelevant to the age of the image area.
Raymond N. Rogers and Anna Arnoldi, in a joint paper of 2003[10] proposed that amines from a recently deceased human body may have undergone Maillard reactions with this carbohydrate layer within a reasonable period of time, before liquid decomposition products stained or damaged the cloth.