This is getting silly. Monk is a mathematician and so is no doubt well aware of the probabilities, but his last four Independent crosswords have all been blogged by me. How likely was that? He’s probably getting rather tired of this, but I’m not, for his crosswords are always good. Tough, though, especially this one, where I had to admit defeat on one clue.
The letters around the outside suggest a Nina of some sort, but I can find nothing except the word ‘orgy’ on the right, which is perhaps a coincidence. But I did find ‘Placebo’ in the second row of unches, then further down ‘Brian Molko’. I imagined that Monk had a friend called Brian Molko who was involved in medical research, but a little Googling quickly revealed my disgraceful ignorance. Evidently they are a group and BM is their lead vocalist and guitarist. No doubt their songs are placed around the answers, but I leave that to you since I can’t find any album names or singles there.
Definitions underlined (except for one of them (5dn, which is fortunately obvious) which I forgot when doing the blog and can’t now recover).