IVF sperm donors can pass their last memories to children who are conceived following the donors death

Dias & Ressler’s new paper which indicates that fear conditioned memories from male IVF donor mice can be inherited by both their children, as well as their grandchildren, even though they had been killed by the IVF harvesting procedure, some time before their offspring were even conceived.

‘Field type’ inheritance effects?

I’m still surprised that the 2011 paper by Nestler et. al. “Paternal Transmission of Stress-Induced Pathologies” hasn’t received more consideration.

Eric Nestler wanted to remove any possible contact by the defeated rodent fathers, with the impregnated female rodent, so used IVF. Comparing the results against defeated rodent fathers who conceived naturally. The offspring never meet their father in all the experiments.

Nestler assumed that if the transmission was really Epigenetic, (through the sperm of the rodent father) there would be no difference between the inheritance effect in IVF offspring, compared to naturally conceived offspring.

However, he found a big difference between the inheritance effect in IVF, compared to natural conception. The problem is he still found an inheritance effect in IVF, just more subdued. Indicating something much more complex is going on.