Access

news feature

Nature 410, 296-298 (15 March 2001) | doi:10.1038/35066717

naturejobs

More science jobs
Post a job for free

Into the mind of a killer

Alison Abbott1

Top

Brain imaging studies are starting to venture into the legal minefield of research into criminal psychopathy. Alison Abbott reports from one of the most controversial frontiers of neuroscience.

Cesare Lombroso, the nineteenth-century Italian criminologist, was the first to argue on scientific grounds that criminals are born, not made. Drawing on emerging theories of evolution and genetics, and the contemporary fad for phrenology, he concluded that those with a 'criminal mind' could be identified by deformations of their skulls.