Once upon a time, a physician conducted six experiments which showed that there is a stable loss of weight upon human death. The physician was Dr. Duncan “Om” MacDougall (c. 1866 – October 15, 1920). In March 1907, accounts of MacDougall’s experiments were published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and the medical journal American Medicine, while the news was spread to the general public by New York Times.

The infamous Wikipedia refers to these experiments with the simple phrase “His results have never been reproduced, and are generally regarded either as meaningless or considered to have had little if any scientific merit“.

However one little detail is important: Not attempting to reproduce an experiment does not mean that “the experiment was not reproduced” !!!

No one actually attempted to reproduce these experiments. No one actually attempted to start a serious scientific investigation so as to verify or refute these experiments. The “credible” source that Wikipedia uses is just another post simply claiming that the experiments of Duncan were based on a small sample. OK. Then why not try to get a larger sample? Why not attempt to get a much larger sample? Why not make this the main goal of medicine? Why not try to look into that? After all, discarding the results could be easy (after 10-12 cases not losing weight, you could easily stop the research) while verifying them could lead to new roads where science has not yet entered. And if the explanation of the weight loss is something as easy as “the patient exhales his last breath”, why not make it official by having that result as the result of an official new investigation of the matter?

Modern materialistic science (especially modern medicine, which loves genetics and money but not humans) is afraid to look at places where it may find things it does not like. But a good detective is the one who looks everywhere for the “suspect”. And someone who says “I will not look at the cellar, because I am afraid to look at the cellar” is certainly not a good detective…