Our bodies are historical accidents of evolution and ultimately can only be understood from an evolutionary perspective: how things got to be the way they are. From this point of view, a good guys-bad guys philosophy is a woefully inadequate way of thinking about molecules as complex as NFKB. Even so, this is the norm. NFKB is usually portrayed as Janus-faced, capable of abrupt swings from the good to the bad and the ugly. Sometimes it destroys neurons, sometimes it protects them. It is important, but profoundly unreliable as a drug target.