He explored the evolutionary implications of paradoxical structuring of commnicational circuitry, and he predicted that researchers should find some enzymic imbalance, probably genetically caused, associated with at least some forms of schizophrenic symptoms. The problem with such a discovery would be determining whether the double bind was an outcome of the enzyme imbalance or a trigger for its expression. Years later, NIH sponsored researchers did indeed discover an allele whose protein caused the enzymic imbalance that Bateson had predicted. Ironically, psychiatrists either forgot or never knew about the prediction, and they took the discovery to be a falsification of the double bind hypothesis. That is, only half of the people with the allele showed schizophrenic symptoms.
Research seems to have stopped there.
The next step of research should have been to study the families of the patients and non-patients to determine differences, if any, in their communication patterns. The results of that research would have made a further step, examination of the variability in chemical pathways involving the normal allele and the mutant allele, feasible and necessary. The money ran out, and it never happened. Scientists love complexity, but funding agencies are often another matter.