Patrick Bateson

0:09:07 Born in 1938 on the Chiltern Hills; father designed the house where I was born; had a brother five years older; William Bateson, the biologist, was a cousin of my grandfather; he coined the term 'genetics'; he had been working on inheritance for a long time and then Mendel's book became available and he suddenly realized how important his work was and became a champion of Mendel; although I never knew him he was a figure in the family; he was Professor of Biology in Cambridge for a while and then became Director of the John Innes Institute which was in London at the time; he was prolific and got the whole subject of genetics going; fiercely opposed by group of biometricians; he was to some extent a role model for me; remember being fascinated by natural history lessons as a small boy; the local school had a very good teacher called Mrs Truscott; had a number of people in our house during the war as mother was Norwegian and as a result had Norwegian refugees, including Karen Spärck Jones; had a very happy childhood

5:59:07 Mother was extraordinarily vivacious and everybody loved her; I hardly knew my father who was wounded and captured at Dunkirk; I used to write to him in the Prisoner of War camp; he was not very well when he came back after the war and only lived for another ten years; he had been an expert in timber drying before the war and during the war took a degree in architecture in the Prisoner of War camp; he had great charm; he had a brother, F.W. Bateson, who was a don at Oxford, an English literary critic; Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist, was a son of William Bateson; I did not meet him until I was a graduate student; I was taken to a conference in U.S. by Robert Hinde as his student and through an error Gregory was also invited; he was astonishingly like my father even though they were second cousins; we still don't understand why these likenesses occur even though the genetic relationship is not very great; he was a powerful, curiously inarticulate man though a coiner of terms; had a cult following in California though think his book 'Steps to an Ecology of Mind' is a dreadful book; I did meet Margaret Mead at a conference who flirted with me as a seemingly younger version of Gregory

13:11:10 After my first school I went to a Prep school in Sussex for five years; I didn't like being sent off as a boarder at eight and to begin with was unhappy; eventually settled down and had a happy time; from there went to Westminster, initially as a day boy as my parents were living with William Bateson's brother in Chelsea, looking after him; became a weekly boarder in my second year; initially I didn't do too well but rose steadily up and by the end was in top sets and had started to do biology, which I loved; also rowing and spent two years in the first eight; hard training and chemistry master was furious at time lost; there was a status advantage in sport that gave me confidence; at fourteen had started going to a bird observatory on the Northumberland coast in my holidays where we caught birds and ringed them to study their migration; we had a neighbour on the Chilterns called Richard Fitter who was a well-known naturalist who had suggested I go there; I had already made up my mind that I wanted to do zoology and wanted to go to Cambridge; there met a schoolmaster who described doing a Ph.D. which sounded like heaven

19:33:06 At school had a very good biology master who had also taught Andrew Huxley; I read 'Apes, Angels and Victorians' which I looked at again recently and it is a very good biography of both Darwin and Huxley; reading it at school was the first time I realized how important Darwin was; Westminster had a liberated feel about it; the then headmaster, Walter Hamilton, used to run an essay society which I wrote for and was very helpful in learning to write well; made some good intellectual contacts there, some of which have persisted; I played the cello though not very well

24:06:18 Came to Cambridge for the scholarship exam; should mention that uncle Ned Bateson had been at King's and keen that I come here; earlier he had take me to see Cambridge and he wanted to take me to his father's house (father had been Master of St John's) to show me a little chestnut he had planted; found an enormous chestnut tree had grown; failed to get a scholarship at that point but got a place at King's in December 1955 and then went to Norway; had a wonderful grandfather who had been Chief Justice when the Germans invaded; the King and Government left but because he stayed he became officially the Government of Norway; he went undercover and ran the resistance; he was never caught by the Nazis and became a hero after the war; I went to live with him and he got me a place in the Natural History Museum in Oslo where I worked every day, learning systematics and how to skin birds; when summer came he introduced me to the Norsk Polarinstitut where I got a place as a deckhand doing hydrographical work and went on an expedition to the north of Spitsbergen where I had masses of time for bird watching; came back and started at King's in October 1957; that winter I went to a conference organised by David Lack at St Hugh's Oxford for undergraduates; he started as a schoolmaster but then wrote a famous book on the life of a robin and then got a place at Oxford; Niko Tinbergen gave a talk about gulls; I met a fellow Cambridge undergraduate called Chris Plowright who had been to Spitsbergen as a geologist; he was also an ornithologist and we wanted to go there to look at the Ivory Gull; talked to Tinbergen who was very enthusiastic as nothing was know about it; a student of his, Esther Cullen, had just published a brilliant paper on the adaptations of the kittiwake, a cliff-nesting gull, and he was very keen that other cliff-nesting gulls should be looked at; Tinbergen had spent a year in Greenland as a young man and was very keen to go back to the Arctic; the plan was that he should lead this expedition but a few months before we left he developed an ulcer which meant he couldn't come; I exploited my contacts with the Norwegian Polar Institute and they took us round to the north-east part of the archipelago where we were dumped on an island with all our provisions and two boats; we couldn't get into the fjord as it was still full of ice but eventually the ice cleared and we could get in and found these pure white gulls nesting on a cliff about 1000 feet up; very exciting to see them; lugged our stuff to the top of the cliff and had five weeks to work on them; found they did not have the adaptations of the kittiwake but it was the first description that had ever been done of them; we nearly got stuck in a blizzard when the boat that was coming to collect us warned us that we were in danger of being iced up in the fjord; Tinbergen was delighted with our results, including very good film; I spent next six months writing up our results

35:47:13 This did conflict with my undergraduate work and only got a 2.2 and feared I'd never be able to do research; George Salt was my supervisor in my first year; he really inspired me, rather severe, but with a formidable mind; after second year did final year zoology which I loved; taught by Donald Parry and John Pringle; Donald Parry was a kind man but not a very good teacher; at the end of my third year got a first and a University prize; George Salt then suggested I aim at a research fellowship at King's; by that time I had met Robert Hinde who was willing to supervise me but didn't want to risk his friendship with Tinbergen by poaching me; did stay in Cambridge; Hinde was Steward at St John's but soon after got a Royal Society research fellowship; he had come back from Oxford to look after the field station which Bill Thorpe had set up at Madingley; in my first year as a graduate student a Lab was built there and it was renamed as Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour which it still is; Robert has a very sharp mind and reads at an astonishing rate; he was a fantastically good supervisor but very critical; he was like that in seminars where he would tear eminent speakers to pieces; he was unrelenting and people who had experienced this remembered it for years after; as students it taught us to be very critical; do remember that Tinbergen was treated very differently as Robert had a very high respect for him; his paper was on the sorts of questions you can ask about behaviour; question of why gulls removed egg shells from their nests; experimented by putting shells at varying distances from dummy nests and found that the greater the distance from the nest the lower the chance that it would be preyed upon by crows and hedgehogs; suggested this was the reason for the gulls action; this was one of the first attempts to look at the functional significance of a behaviour pattern; he made the point that if you know what the current function of something is it doesn't tell you why it evolved; it could be that when this habit evolved they were then nesting in marshes where the presence of an egg might have actually encouraged disease; possible that this behaviour pattern evolved for one reason but was co-opted for another later in evolution; he was clear about this but many people still muddle it; Robert a marvellous supervisor and had a number of distinguished student such as Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Tim Clutton-Brock and many others

47:38:22 I applied for a Harkness Fellowship and got one to go to California and wanted to work on the mechanisms of behaviour; went to the Lab of a man called Karl Pribram who was a neuro-surgeon and neuro-psychologist; quite different from Robert Hinde; he just loved ideas and was constantly coming up with wild theories; I wanted to work on the neural basis of behaviour and spent two years there; got a rather liberating way of thinking about theory whereas Robert was rather anti-theoretical; an interesting thing to come out of that was an experiment that I did which was to put illuminated panels of letters in monkeys cages which they were exposed to for some time; later they were taken to some apparatus where if they pressed panels letter came up and if they got the right one they got a peanut; discovered that if the monkey had seen one of the letters before then it learnt very quickly; if it had seen two of them then they took much longer to learn to discriminate them than animals that had never seen them before; in a sense they had classified them together and when they had to discriminate between them they had to unlearn the categorisation; this was a new observation and that became the work of one of my graduate students when I came back to Cambridge; I resumed work on behavioural imprinting which I'd done for a Ph.D.; while I was in California I submitted a dissertation to King's and got a junior research fellowship; an important moment as it changed the course of my life; got this in 1964 and that summer had to interrupt the work I was doing as the Harkness insisted that we spent three months travelling round the States; they gave us a car to travel to all the main regions; at the time I was a bit fed up as I wanted to get on with my experiment; of course we had a wonderful trip; then continued working there for a final year; had just married before leaving for California

53:29:20 On coming back to Cambridge had a job lined up for me at Madingley as well where I became senior assistant in research and had the responsibility of looking after day to day administration; Bill Thorpe was my boss and Robert had by that time got a Royal Society research fellowship and fairly soon after became director of an MRC unit within the Sub Department; decided to resume the work I had been doing on behavioural imprinting; about that time came into King's for dinner and sat next to a delightful neuro-scientist working in the Anatomy Department and discovered that he was very interested in the neural basis of learning; that was Gabriel Horn and we started on a long period of collaboration; we think quite differently in many ways but at the same time complemented each other in a really important way and got a great deal out of it, including a long friendship; think that dining together is a very important way for intellectual ideas to flow; to get this coming together between different disciplines is much more difficult in universities where departments have little opportunity to meet; in Oxford and Cambridge we have this fantastic opportunity to meet people; often in the interstices between disciplines that exciting things happen

57:46:24 At that point Gabriel went on sabbatical to Uganda but when he came back we started working together; we didn't know what to measure at that time and teamed up with a pharmacologist called Les Iversen; he left after a while as he thought we were getting nowhere; Gabriel and I went down to give seminars to a group that Steven Rose ran in London; we wanted to find a biochemist who was keen to collaborate and Steven had been interested in the effects of experience on the nervous system; started an important collaboration between the three of us; then designed increasingly complicated experiments which I think were very important; when you try to look for changes in the brain associated with experience there are all sorts of things that can be going on - the animals can become more active, stressed, attentive, stimulated; if you want to know whether the things you are measuring are specifically related to the laying down of the memory you have to do a whole set of experiments, each of which includes a sub-set of possibilities; devised a kind of triangulation approach which I still think was intellectually very important; sometimes when I see people doing work on the neural basis of behaviour they have not gone through the rigour of excluding alternative explanations; famous example is all the imaging that people do; took us several years but finally able to say pretty confidently that there was an area in the brain which was necessary for the laying down of a memory and specifically related to that; we then needed to identify it much more precisely and at that point Gabriel was moving to; still needed to identify the precise point and developed a technique whereby you take two groups of chicks one of which had learnt as much as it will learn about the imprinting object and a group that has just started to learn; you wait a day and then train both groups for the same amount of time; one group has learnt everything and the other has a lot to learn; they are both stimulated in the same way and at that point you introduce your biochemical marker; then you kill them, slice their brain and see where the activity is occurring; using this technique of under-training or over-training then re-training them next day we were able to find an area of the brain which was particularly related to the laying down of memory; very important as once found the area could be lesioned before imprinting or after when memory of the imprinting object would be destroyed; that became the basis for a lot of work, some of which I was involved with, which Gabriel built on which became a very important starting point for a whole programme of research

SECOND PART

0:09:07 Experience with Tinbergen and his interest in function still going on in the back of my mind so asking myself what is the function of imprinting; the usual answer is that animals imprint in order to know what their species looks like; I developed the thought that it enables you to know what your mother or father looks like so you can avoid the hazards of responding in a filial way to someone who is not your parent; if you look at ducks you will see that a female will attack a baby that is not her own; sexual imprinting takes place later in development; developed argument that this enables you to identify close kin and when adult you chose a mate who is a bit different but not too different; strikes a balance between inbreeding and outbreeding too much; followed with experiments on a quail colony at Madingley and found they had a very strong preference for individuals who were their first cousins that they had never seen before; whether this goes on in the wild is another matter but it indicated that imprinting provided a standard to offset mating preference against; echoes the preference for cross-cousins in human societies throughout the world; did not like the suggestion that these findings explained the incest taboo which I see as conformist behaviour; another thing I was interested in was the development of mother-offspring relationships in cats and also play in cats as little good systematic work had been done on play; love cats and breed them at home; two interesting things came out of this work, one is that play is heterogeneous i.e. play with each other before play with objects; secondly, there had been idea of parent-offspring conflict which was particularly marked at the time of weaning but I felt this was wrong; found that if the mother was in bad shape the offspring pick this up and wean themselves and go onto solid food; conversely the mother has to be sensitive to the condition of her offspring and if they are in poor shape she will spend much longer looking after them if able to do so; now interested in the ways in which cats develop depending on conditions in the environment; David Barker's work on the life histories of babies recorded in a midwife's notes from the early part of the twentieth century; found that small babies were much more likely to get heart disease as adults; association of a mismatch between the environmental conditions at birth and the subsequent change which meant they were not adapted to deal with them; problem acute in places like India where heart disease and diabetes are at epidemic levels; conversely, big babies are poorly adapted for famine conditions; reflections from demography; effects on subsequent generations spawned whole new field of research, epigenetics, where the mechanisms of transgenerational adaptation are explored; no actual change in the DNA but suppression of some parts of the genome and activation of others which are appropriate for the lived in environment and for their offspring; human migration and adaptation subjects of great interest now because of the health implications

15:00:11 Was critical of Richard Dawkin's selfish gene hypothesis as it misled people into thinking genes actively determined development although he himself did not actually think that; he went on to argue that communication did not involve the transmission of useful information but was merely manipulation; still people who believe in the selfish gene rather than cooperative behaviour but they has been a shift toward the latter

17:29:16 By the mid-eighties I had been in Cambridge for a long time and had seen how refreshed colleagues were by going elsewhere; then it was suggested that I should be a candidate for Provostship when Bernard Williams retired; I was a bit reluctant but agreed; odd election as a lot of the younger fellows wanted a Provost from outside and had I been one I would have agreed with them; found the campaigning uncomfortable and feared it would divide the college; I was just elected by a few votes; there was a lot of ill-feeling afterwards and I quite often had a really difficult time on the governing body which persisted for quite a few years; about halfway through things changed and it became much easier; that said, it was a very interesting period for me as it allowed Dusha, my wife, and I to work together because the job requires a lot of entertaining; she was a marvellous hostess; it also allowed us to meet people we would otherwise never have met; the most startling of these was Princess Margaret; shortly I took up residence in the Lodge, Jack Plumb, the historian, asked me to invite her to the Advent Carol service; when she accepted, Plumb said she would stay for the weekend; she came with entourage; we had to treat her as royalty and she was a little awkward about coming into an academic household; it went well and having done it once, Plumb again asked us to host her; she came about seven times in all; over the years we got rather fond of her and it became quite a nice relationship; on another occasion the Dalai Lama stayed; he was wonderful, with an extraordinary warmth about him; he brought two monks with him and we were told he would not have any food after midday though he did join us when we ate; was very interested in science and quizzed me about my work; talked about Tibet and the Lama system; was not very keen on the latter though thought the culture of Tibet was important; the Lama system was, in fact, fairly recent; interesting that when the Chinese moved up to Tibet their the women had to move down to lower altitudes to have their babies; set me wondering whether there could have been selection over the centuries to allow Tibetans to survive at high altitude; we had a question and answer session with him and our students and he was asked who did he most admire in the world and he said Gorbachev; by that time (c1991) Gorbachev was very unpopular in Russia, but the Dalai Lama thought he had done more for world peace than anybody; later on John Barber invited Gorbachev to come to a conference in King's and he stayed with us; when Bukovsky who had been persecuted in the Brezhnev era and had got out, he became a student here, stayed on in Cambridge and became involved in extreme right-wing movement; he wrote to me saying it was intolerable that I was going to host Gorbachev in the Lodge; told him that what was good enough for the Dalai Lama was good enough for me; found Gorbachev fascinating

30:19:19 Another visitor was Salman Rushdie who was then in hiding but we heard that he wanted to give an address in the Chapel; we agreed; incredible police procedure as they feared for his life; they minutely inspected the Chapel and the Lodge garden; Dadie Rylands complained about rough looking types with dogs in the garden; Salman came for lunch and all the guests were carefully vetted; behind every curtain was an armed Special Branch man; sitting in Provosts stall in the chapel, looking up at ceiling bosses which are Tudor roses, seen from the side, look like the face of an angry man; not sure how intentional it was but once you see it you see it all the time; notion that God scowling at me as a non-believer; think I am an atheist as I really don't believe in a god; was brought up in Church of England tradition and I love a lot of the ceremony; music in the Chapel is wonderful and am a great supporter of the choir and Stephen Cleobury; thought that this was one of the truly great things about this college; I had no compunction about taking part in ceremonies though could have been accused of hypocrisy; predecessor were of similar opinions; coaching for bible reading from Dadie Rylands was just to breath deeply

38:49:47 When I had to take on role of fund raiser that meant quite a lot of travel in the US and meeting absolutely delightful people; there were aspects of the job which I liked very much; also in the second part of my Provostship I instituted the Provost Seminars which were also very good; brought students and fellows together and we had some marvellous speakers; also Dusha and I used to have musical evenings in the Lodge; students would organise the music and we would give them a meal afterwards

40:57:16 One of the changes that occurred during my career as a behavioural biologist was the increasing rigour in the way people worked; had a very bright graduate student, Paul Martin, who came back to Cambridge as a post-graduate for a while; wrote 'Measuring Behaviour' with him which has been very successful; marked a change in the subject where people were getting increasingly careful about how they measured and did experiments; downside was that it is very easy to measure things in a trivial way and stop focussing on the big questions; at the same time I was also editing a series with a man called Peter Klapfer where we were trying to encourage people not to be constrained by tight methodology; we invited essays for this series and sometimes got pieces that were incomprehensible so had to strike a balance; many good students at Madingley, particularly in the 1970's, like Tim Clutton-Brock and Richard Wrangham; also some very good research assistants, one of whom was Pril Barrett now wife of Gabriel Horn and she worked with me on play in cats; Nick Humphrey had been a student of Larry Weiskrantz and gone with him to Oxford; applied for a job at Madingley and he was a delightful and stimulating man, doing interesting work; however he felt increasingly that very few people would actually read his papers and wanted to get at a much wider audience; decided to get involved in television and mistakenly, I thought, gave up his job to make films; in the end the films were not very well done and he had a difficult time getting back into the academic world; in a book that Robert Hinde and I edited celebrating twenty-five years since Madingley was established, Nick wrote a wonderful chapter on the social function of intellects, the most cited chapter in the book which started to become a whole new field on brain development

46:38:23 I had been doing a study for the National Trust on the hunting of red deer by hounds; suspect they thought I would do a whitewash but I decided it was to be done properly; reported to the Trust in great secrecy and on the strength of my report they banned such hunting immediately; I became the object of hatred to hunting people and they did their utmost to ruin my reputation; just at that time I was elected to become Biological Secretary of the Royal Society; I enjoyed the role as it enabled me to encourage the Royal Society to be much more positive in getting science across to the public; Aaron Klug was President when I joined and in his quiet way did a lot; he is a shy man who doesn't relish a public profile, but a wonderful man; his successor, Bob May, was quite different and very good at projecting science; as Biological Secretary I had to sit on all the sectional committees which deal with biological candidates for the Royal Society; was worried about tactical voting and decided to institute a new procedure which made the voting records transparent and encouraged honesty

51:37:07 When Gabriel Horn retired from the headship of the Zoology Department to become head of Sydney Sussex I agreed to take it over; thought it would not be for very long as we had a candidate from the US, Jared Diamond, who everybody wanted; he wanted to come but the pension arrangements are so much worse here and after a long period of indecision he decided not to; the next candidate also failed to come so my period of headship extended; at the same time I was Provost of King's; the difference between the department and King's was striking; department meetings were businesslike and efficient; at King's there would be long discussions which appeared to be reaching a consensus when someone who had been quiet until that point suddenly lobbed in a hand grenade and shattered the consensus and you would have to start again

54:47:04 Noel Annan was Provost when I was an undergraduate and later became a good friend; an important Provost who got the Research Centre going; Edmund Leach, his successor, was also interesting and we had good discussions on the whole business of nature and nurture; towards the end of his Provostship he was torn about whether he should give up so he appointed a committee of three to give him advice on when he should retire - Bernard Williams, myself and Ross Harrison - three future Provosts; Bernard Williams was totally different in style; very quick and intelligent but could lose patience with people; it was he who persuaded me to take over as Provost

59:45:06 Advice to a young scientist is to enjoy it.