More than 600 people with MS. Same diagnosis, wildly different trajectories. Some collect new lesions like parking tickets. Others lose brain volume quietly, efficiently, almost politely. The old drawers labeled “relapsing” and “progressive” help… but only up to a point.

No murder weapon. No fingerprints. Just: tattoo ink, a swollen lymph node, and vaccine responses acting like someone had been secretly tinkering with the immune system.

On my desk, brain slices, calcium traces, behavioural diagrams and actigraphy curves were piling up. Right in the middle: a fresh, delightfully demanding paper on astrocytes, those supposedly minor characters of the nervous system. The perfect basis for a new case, I thought: a proper neuro–crime story, built on a recent astrocyte review article in...

While half of London is wondering whether the bin collection will be on time, I, SherlockMS, self-appointed Chief Inspector for Cerebral Affairs, am occupied with a more elegant question: Who actually takes out the brain’s rubbish? 🧠🚮

I refer, of course, to the splendid work “Single-cell spatial transcriptomic profiling defines a pathogenic inflammatory niche in chronic active MS lesions”, a scientific dossier that reads as though the authors had been peering over my shoulder while I inspected the MS-affected brain through my magnifying lens.

Fifty years of monoclonal antibodies. And of course, it’s a criminal case ...