- Fred Ramsdell won the Nobel Prize this week for his work in immunology.
- Ramsdell missed the call and the announcement while on an off-the-grid trip in the mountains.
- Ramsdell had received hundreds of congratulatory messages by the time he turned his phone back on.
Prior to announcing winners to the world, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, calls each person individually to deliver the good news.
This year, however, the organization was not able to reach all of the medicine prize winners prior to Monday’s announcement.
One of them, Fred Ramsdell, an immunologist at Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, did not find out the news until Tuesday.
He was on a three-week camping trip through Montana, Idaho and Wyoming enjoying a “digital detox" in the American West.
During an interview with The New York Times while still in Montana, Ramsdell explained how it was his wife who had turned on her phone while on their way back to the hotel. Letting out a yell, Ramsdell thought she had seen a bear.
But no, nothing that exciting.
According to the Times, Ramsdell recalled his wife yelling, “You just won the Nobel Prize!”
When he said that he didn’t, she replied, “I have 200 text messages saying that you did!”
Not only did Ramsdell miss the call from the Nobel committee, he was late in receiving the worldwide well-wishing and attention that followed the announcement.
Ramsdell told the Times that he “certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” and that “it never crossed my mind.”
His family owns a house in Whitefish, Montana, where he was going when he finally received the news. Heading up there earlier this week, he said he was looking forward to celebrating with his colleagues.
What was the prize for?
Along with Mary E. Brunkow, a molecular biologist and immunologist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Shimon Sakaguchi, an immunologist at Osaka University in Japan, Ramsdell received the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their fundamental discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.”
“Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel committee, said in a statement.
The three winners will share the 11 million Swedish kronor prize, which converts to more than a million dollars.
Their research laid the groundwork for future researchers to begin studying a whole new field of medicine based on how the immune system identifies safe and unsafe pathogens in the body.
“The microbes that threaten our health do not wear a uniform — they all have different appearances. Many have also developed similarities to human cells, as a form of camouflage. So how does the immune system keep track of what to attack and what to protect? Why doesn’t the immune system attack our bodies more frequently?” reads the award statement.
Their discoveries are now being tested in clinical trials and have the potential to help with new treatments for cancer and autoimmune disorders.