To begin, just in 2014, a group of biologists ran a PCR DNA amplification.

PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. DNA stands for deoxy ribonucleic acid.

I'm a physicist, not a biologist, so don't hold me to all that.

So they ran this amplification on a number of samples to compare their genetic material.

This is a standard biological procedure, so I'm told, and used every day in all sorts of scientific and forensic labs.

The reason I bring up this particular case is because some of those samples that were tested were consecrated Eucharistic hosts

that had been obtained surreptitiously from nearby Catholic churches. Setting aside the questionable

method of obtaining these hosts and the sacrilegious nature of the treatment of what Catholics

hold most holy and dear, it's not the worst thing that's been

done to the Eucharist in the past. But what the biologists were trying to show, arguing that they

were going to show, is that once and for all that the Eucharist is not the body of Christ.

If Catholics believe in transubstantiation, the most fundamental place that you can talk about the substance of something they argued must be the DNA.

I'm sure Catholics claim that it still looks like and tastes like bread, looks like and tastes like wine, but if there's anything that's going to be changing, will you go down to the smallest pieces? Maybe the DNA is changing.

And so they were going to test this and see.

And so they ran this test and the results are here.

If you haven't seen one of these before, I've seen about two in my life.

So on the left, what you do is you take the sample and you have what are called

primers, which are associated

with particular types of DNA, and they cause that type of DNA to multiply those a lot, and

therefore you get sort of bold lines where you have matches to particular types of DNA.

So on this half, the samples were primed with human specific primers, things that are supposed

to make human DNA glow and show up on this kind.

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