Letters: Sir Patrick Bateson obituary
Steven Rose writes: I first met Pat Bateson in the late 60s, as we shared a mutual interest in the brain mechanisms involved in learning and memory. We became firm friends, and it was the start of a decade-long, and I believe unique, collaboration between Pat, a behavioural biologist, Gabriel Horn, an anatomist, and me as a biochemist. Pat’s favoured model was the dayold chick, primed to learn to recognise its mother – imprinting. Together, we identified the brain regions required for such learning to take place, and the cellular and molecular mechanisms that encoded the memory.
Years later, we made a memorable trip to the Galápagos (on, appropriately, a boat called Beagle), with Pat and his daughter Melissa, a biologist, impressing us with their capacity to identify birds by the merest flicker of feathers as they flew past.
More recently, he was a stalwart supporter of the Palestinian calls for
peace and justice.
Michael Yudkin writes: Pat Bateson and I first met as students, and our close friendship lasted until his death; I was privileged to help him with the editing of his last book, Behaviour, Development and Evolution. When my family suffered a major crisis some years ago, his warmth and understanding went far beyond common kindness.
Only once in almost 60 years did we have a significant disagreement, when Pat was persuaded to sign a statement in support of a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. But more recently he came to accept that such a boycott would subject Israeli academics to undeserved harm. An article that we wrote jointly earlier this year ended: “We have come together in believing that a general boycott of Israeli academic institutions is not justifiable.”
Karl Sabbagh writes: I got to know Pat Bateson when we were both members of the advisory committee of the British False Memory Society. His belief in the importance of reliable data for making policy decisions, which was shown in his data on stress levels in hunted deer, influenced his belief that many “recovered memories” of child abuse were caused by the methods used by psychotherapists.