Nobel prize winner Ramsdell was hiking 'off grid' and couldn't be reached by Nobel committee

Fred Ramsdell of Sonoma Biotherapeutics was hiking and "off grid" and so could not be reached by the Nobel Committee to let him know he had won the Prize in the Physiology or Medicine category.

Ramsdell shared the 2025 award with Mary Brunkow of Seattle, Washington and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells.

A spokesperson from his Sonoma Biotherapeutics told the Guardian that he was “living his best life” on an “off the grid” hiking foray.

Jeffrey Bluestone, a friend of Ramsdell’s and co-founder of the lab, said the researcher deserves credit but he couldn’t reach him, either.

“I have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho,” Bluestone told AFP.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute also hit a roadblock trying to reach Brunkow but eventually got ahold of her.

Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly said it took until Tuesday morning Swedish time before he got to talk to the laureate, who was completely off-grid when the award was announced the previous day.

Ramsdell thought his wife had spotted a grizzly bear in the backcountry of Wyoming when she suddenly let out a yell on Monday - only to discover he had won the most coveted award in science.

"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," Perlmann told Reuters.

"Fortunately, it was the Nobel Prize. He was very happy and elated and had not expected the prize at all."

Nobel announcements have not been without hiccups in the past. Poet and musician Bob Dylan ignored his 2016 Nobel literature prize for weeks, while a 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 in contacting 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.

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