The Italian surgeon Cesare Lombroso developed his theory of “physiognomy” — that physical traits expressed inborn criminality — in the most tech-startup way possible. In the 1860s, while Lombroso was working as a psychiatry professor at the University of Pavia, a local Italian worker died in prison, where he had been incarcerated for 20 years for stealing food. A trained physician, Lombroso was asked to perform the postmortem autopsy, during which he had a realization: The criminal, and in fact all criminals, looked to his eyes like apes. What if, Lombroso reasoned, this meant that criminality was both a natural-born trait and, as leading scientists of his era were proposing for all sorts of human failings, connected to “racial degeneration”?