Tuyen Ong considers himself a bit of a nomad.

Early in his life, he came to the UK as a refugee from Vietnam, and obtained his MD at University College London. Then he went to NYU for an MBA and began his career in biopharma at Pfizer, making further stops across the country at Bausch + Lomb, PTC Therapeutics and most recently Biogen.

Now, he’s ready for his next gig: CEO-partner at Flagship Pioneering and CEO of Ring Therapeutics, a gene therapy outfit where he’ll be running the show. When Ong looks back at his career, he says he can see how all the dots connected to lead him to this point.

Michael Varney began his post-Genentech career by taking a job as chairman of R&D at a biotech startup. Now he’s signed on for a new gig that will put him in direct contact with a whole lot more.

The biotech vet — who enjoyed a stellar reputation running Roche’s prestigious gRED organization in South San Francisco — is one of two freshly minted life sciences senior advisors at Frazier Healthcare Partners. Pfizer vet Don Frail has been tapped for the same role after most recently leading the external science and innovation team at Allergan.

GlaxoSmithKline CEO Emma Walmsley is adding a royal title to her name. In Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Birthday Honours — which came a bit late this year due to the pandemic — Walmsley was dubbed a dame.

The Birthday Honours are intended to recognize “outstanding achievements” across the UK. This year, about a third of the awards were given to “heroes” of the pandemic, according to The Guardian. Dames are equivalent in status to knights — a title earned by Walmsley’s predecessor Andrew Witty in 2012.

Charles Lieber, the Harvard scientist facing federal charges for allegedly lying about Chinese funding, is mounting a fierce legal defense, beginning with the enlistment of a high-profile attorney and a lawsuit against his employer.

Lieber hired Marc Mukasey, a criminal attorney who defended former Navy Seal Edward Gallagher against war crime charges last year and currently represents Eric Trump in a New York state fraud case, the New York Times first reported. And on Friday, he filed suit against Harvard, alleging the university abandoned him and their responsibility to indemnify him or aid his legal defense.

Rick Bright, the federal vaccines official turned whistleblower, resigned from the government yesterday, firing a final charge of political meddling at the Trump Administration as he departed.

Bright had led BARDA for 4 years before being suddenly removed from the post in April, just as the once little-known agency was gearing up for what would ultimately be a more than $10 billion effort to accelerate vaccines and therapeutics for one of the worst pandemics in modern history. In subsequent statements, whistleblower complaints, and congressional testimony, he alleged that he was ousted for resisting a plan to mass distribute hydroxychloroquine — a Trump-touted drug that has since repeatedly proven ineffective — to hard-hit areas and described an extended history of political interference in agency decision-making.

ImmunoGen CBO Blaine McKee got laid off after the company had a big Phase III failure last March, but by the time his official exit came around in December, he already landed a plum new gig. ARCH Venture Partners had tapped the longtime executive to run a biotech willing to spend a lot of cash in an area that had gone under-invested: kidney disease.

Now that biotech is emerging from stealth mode with 12 employees, $51 million in Series A funding from ARCH and UCB Venture and two new methods of directly attacking a disease and an organ that drug developers have long only tried to mitigate from the side. They’ve also got a new name: Walden Biosciences.