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He thought his wife saw a bear, but she shouted that he had won the Nobel Prize! The scientist learns the news in the middle of the mountain

2025-10-08 18:34:09Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Fred Ramsdell

Scientist Fred Ramsdell was on a digital detox in a rural US town when he was startled by his wife's scream, The Guardian reports. He thought she had seen a mountain bear, but he soon learned a more pleasant surprise: he had won the Nobel Prize in medicine.

The Nobel Committee had been unable to contact the immunologist, who had set his cell phone to wireless after going camping in the mountains, but was finally able to contact the couple on Tuesday morning.

“They were still on the mountain and there are a lot of bears there, so he was worried when she screamed,” said the committee’s secretary general, Thomas Perlmann. “Fortunately, it was the Nobel Prize. He was very happy and excited and didn’t expect the prize at all.”

Perlmann said Ramsdell and his wife, Laura O'Neill, were driving back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something in their car. At that moment, Laura turned on her cell phone and saw dozens of congratulatory messages.

Ramsdell told the New York Times that he “didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize at all.” The couple had been traveling for three weeks in the mountain ranges of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. “It didn’t even cross my mind,” he said.

Ramsdell shared the prestigious award with Mary Brunkow of the Systems Biology Institute in Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their discoveries about how the immune system works. They will receive a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor.

The prize is dedicated to a significant discovery about T cells, which are key to the immune system. These white blood cells, produced in the bone marrow, target microbes and kill infected or cancerous cells. They are often called the "security guards."

Perlmann said that initially he was only able to contact Sakaguchi, then Brunkow, while Ramsdell was still outside the coverage area.

A spokesman for the San Francisco lab where Ramsdell works later said the scientist was "enjoying life" and was "off the grid."

It's not the first time that contacting Nobel laureates has become difficult. Bob Dylan ignored his literature prize for days in 2016, and when the medicine prize was announced in 2011, it was learned that one of the winners had died a few days earlier.

In 2020, the committee faced similar difficulties with the economics prize winners. When they called Bob Wilson at Stanford in the middle of the night, he hung up and they called his wife. They couldn't reach Paul Milgrom, so Wilson went to wake him up. Security camera footage captured the moment Milgrom learned he had won the prize, saying, "I won it? Wow."


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