And now, Fred Ramsdell’s mountainside detox turned into a headline-making moment. Instead of wildlife spotting or scenic selfies, he got a Nobel Prize.
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Imagine being out in the wild, surrounded by mountains, streams, and maybe even a grizzly bear, and then hearing you’ve just won a Nobel Prize. That’s exactly what happened to immunologist Fred Ramsdell.
Fred Ramsdell, 64, was enjoying a digital detox in the rugged backcountry of the western United States with his wife, Laura O’Neill, when the unexpected news arrived. As the couple stopped to fix something on their car, Laura’s excited yell made Ramsdell fear the worst, a grizzly nearby.
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But the “danger” was far sweeter: he had just won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, #FredRamsdell and #ShimonSakaguchi “for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.”
Read more:https://t.co/ifky81nWpe#NobelPrize #nobelprize2025 #Medicine #BreakingNews pic.x.com/F0zpPnptAh
— The Statesman (@TheStatesmanLtd) October 6, 2025
The Swedish Nobel committee had been trying to reach Ramsdell for hours. His phone, naturally, was on airplane mode, as he had no intention of checking messages while hiking across Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.
“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. “Luckily, it was the Nobel prize instead. He was thrilled and totally surprised.”
Speaking to the New York Times later from a hotel in Montana, Ramsdell admitted, “It certainly didn’t cross my mind. I was just enjoying the mountains and nature.”
Clearly, even world-class scientists need a break from emails and phones.
Ramsdell shares this year’s prize with Mary Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan. The trio received recognition for groundbreaking work on T-cells, the immune system’s “security guards” that flag invaders and destroy infected or cancerous cells.
Earlier in the announcement, the Nobel committee had only managed to contact Sakaguchi, while they reached Brunkow later. Ramsdell, however, remained “off the grid,” as a spokesperson for his San Francisco-based lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, put it. His friend and lab co-founder, Jeffrey Bluestone, joked that he had been trying to reach Ramsdell but assumed he was “backpacking in the mountains”.
This is not the first time Nobel winners have been tricky to contact. In 2016, musician Bob Dylan ignored his Literature Prize for days. In 2011, one medicine prize winner had passed away just before the announcement. And in 2020, economist Bob Wilson’s phone call came in the middle of the night, and he unplugged it, forcing the committee to call his wife instead. Footage of Paul Milgrom, the other winner, shows him waking up, confused, and saying, “Yeah, I have? Wow.”
And now, Fred Ramsdell’s mountainside detox turned into a headline-making moment. Instead of wildlife spotting or scenic selfies, he got a Nobel Prize.
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