Gregory Bateson

GREGORY BATESON was born in 1904, the son of William Bateson, a leading British biologist and a pioneering geneticist. Resisting family pressures to follow in his father's footsteps, he completed his degree in anthropology instead of the natural sciences, and left England to do field work in New Guinea. It was on his second trip there, in 1956, that he met his fellow anthropologist Margaret Mead, whom he later married; their only child, Mary Catherine Bateson, is also an anthropologist. Bateson and Mead were divorced in 1950, but they continued to collaborate professionally and maintained their friendship until Mead's death in 1978. In the years to follow, Bateson became a visiting professor of anthropology at Harvard (1947); was appointed research associate at the Langley Porrer Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco; worked as Ethnologist at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Hospital (where he developed the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and formulated a new theory of learning). He worked with dolphins at the Oceanographic Institute in Hawaii and taught ar the University of Hawaii. In 1972 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz.