Out on a digital detox in the western US backcountry, scientist Fred Ramsdell was startled when his wife let out a yell. He feared she had spotted a grizzly bear, only to discover a far better surprise – he had won the Nobel prize in medicine.
The Nobel committee had been unable to reach the immunologist, whose phone was on airplane mode as he was on a hiking and camping trip, but finally got through to the couple early on Tuesday morning, Swedish time.
“They were still in the wild and there are plenty of grizzly bears there, so he was quite worried when she let out a yell,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary general of the Nobel committee. “Fortunately, it was the Nobel prize. He was very happy and elated and had not expected the prize at all.”
Perlmann said Ramsdell and his wife, Laura O’Neill, had been heading back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car. That was the moment Ramsdell’s wife switched on her mobile phone and saw the dozens of congratulatory messages.
Speaking to the New York Times from a hotel in Montana later on Tuesday, Ramsdell said he “certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel prize”. The couple had been on a three-week trip that crossed the mountain ranges of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. “It never crossed my mind,” he said.
Ramsdell shared the 2025 prestigious prize with Mary Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their discoveries related to the functioning of the immune system. They will receive a prize of 11m Swedish kronor (about £871,400).
The award celebrates a fundamental discovery relating to T-cells, an important player in the immune system. T-cells are a type of white blood cell, produced in the bone marrow, that help to flag invading microbes and kill infected or cancerous cells. They are often referred to as “security guards”.
At the time of the initial announcement on Monday, Perlmann revealed he had managed to reach only Sakaguchi. “We have their phone numbers, but they’re probably on silent mode,” he said. Brunkow was later contacted, but Ramsdell, 64, remained incommunicado.
A spokesperson from Ramsdell’s San Francisco-based lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said later on Monday that he was “living his best life” and was “off the grid”.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Bluestone, a friend of Ramsdell and co-founder of the lab, said he had “been trying to get a hold of him” but thought “he may be backpacking”.
Contacting Nobel prize winners across the globe has been a continuing frustration. The musician Bob Dylan ignored his 2016 Nobel literature prize for days, while the 2011 medicine prize was announced only to find that one of the winners had died days before.
In 2020, the Nobel committee had similar difficulties for the winners of the prize for economics. When Bob Wilson’s phone rang in Stanford in the middle of the night, he unplugged it, so the committee had to call his wife instead.
When the committee could not reach his fellow winner Paul Milgrom either, Wilson had to go and wake him up. Footage from Milgrom’s security camera captured the moment he was told of his Nobel win, to which he responded: “Yeah, I have? Wow.”
Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
