ok i was wrong.. it wasnt in a sealed container, i think i might have been remembering something from a dan brown book.
but i found this
In 1907, Dr. Duncan McDougall weighed six patients, while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis. When death was imminent, the entire bed of the patient was quickly placed on a highly sensitive industrial sized scale. In each case, when the patient expired, he noticed an extremely small sudden change in the weight of the deceased which could not be accounted for by other means. The missing mass, which this weight loss represented, was used to support his hypothesis that the body had a soul which had mass. On the death of the visible body, the soul departed, and so did this mass. The weight of the soul, based on the average loss of mass in six patients, was measured by McDougall to be 21 grams. A paper summarising his findings appeared in the journal American Medicine in 1907. One critic quickly pointed out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the loss was perhaps due to ejected urine and/or faeces. McDougall rebutted that if this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon the scale.
Someone else suggested that the dying patients; final exhalation might have contributed to the drop in weight. To disprove this, McDougall climbed into the bed and exhaled as forcibly as possible1; while his assistant watched the scale. No change was observed.
In 1988, Noetic Science carried out experiments on the largest number of patients and concluded that the human soul weighs 1/3,000th of an ounce. The experiments were carried out by East German researchers who weighed more than 200 terminally ill patients just before and immediately after their deaths. In each case the weight loss was exactly the same ; 1/3,000th of an ounce.
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