Fred Ramsdell, one of three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, learned of his win nearly 12 hours after it was announced. He only found out while parking his car in Montana when his wife saw hundreds of congratulatory messages on her phone.
Fred Ramsdell, one of three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, learned of his win nearly 12 hours after it was announced. He only found out while parking his car in Montana when his wife saw hundreds of congratulatory messages on her phone.
Ramsdell’s story is reported by The New York Times. The night before, he and his wife, Laura O’Neill, had been driving after a multi-day trip through Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The scientist’s phone was in airplane mode, so he didn’t hear the Nobel Committee’s call on the 2nd night. When the couple finally broke out of their «digital silence,» Laura exclaimed, «You just won a Nobel!» — she had more than 200 messages on her screen with the same news.
Ramsdell, 64, is the chief scientific officer at Sonoma Biotherapeutics. His career has been in immunology, with discoveries that have helped improve treatments for autoimmune diseases such as certain types of arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease. The lab confirmed that at the time of the announcement, the winner was «living his best life offline» — on a pre-planned trip through the mountains with two dogs and a small trailer behind a Toyota 4Runner.
That evening, at a hotel in Livingston, near Yellowstone National Park, Ramsdell tried to call back the secretary of the Nobel Assembly, Thomas Perlman, but it was already 11 p.m. in Stockholm and he was asleep. They finally spoke the next morning at about 6:15 a.m. Swedish time. Perlman noted that he had never had such difficulty reaching the laureate since 2016. Ramsdell himself admitted that he had not expected any important calls that day and had «not even thought» about the possibility of receiving the prize.
The journey was coming to an end: Tuesday was about another six hours of driving to the family’s fall/winter home near Whitefish, Montana. «I’m grateful and touched — I’m glad the work has been recognized, and I want to share it with my colleagues,» the scientist said.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine celebrates fundamental discoveries that transform our understanding of the human body and the treatment of disease. The stories of the laureates often combine years of routine laboratory work with unexpected moments of glory, like Ramsdell, who received the news of his most prestigious scientific award not in his office but at a campsite in the Rocky Mountains.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how in Sweden, three professors from American universities received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research into quantum mechanics and electrical circuits.
