21 SOULS

Dr Duncan MacDougal was an early 20 century physician.  He was intrigued by the idea that humans had souls, those souls had a mass and that mass could be weighed.  He persuaded six terminally ill patients to lie on a specially constructed bed set on a weighing platform during the final moments of their lives and recorded their weight at the point of death, as their souls left their earthly body.   Out of the six deaths, two had to be discarded, three showed an immediate drop of weight followed by an increase and one showed a drop of weight of 21 grams, In 1907 he published his findings in the New York Times stating that the soul weighed 21 grams.  However, the results failed to achieve acceptance as scientific canon and is exactly the reason why I am enthralled with the concept of 21 grams.