STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Nobel medicine prize winner Fred 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.
Ramsdell shared the 2025 award with Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, but the Nobel Assembly could not reach him as he was on a camping and hiking trip with his wife.
Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, 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.
Perlmann said Ramsdell and his wife were heading back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car and she switched on her cell phone and saw the messages.
“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.
