Off-Grid Hike: Nobel Laureate Fred Ramsdell Was Unreachable During Prize Call
On the day the committee tried to reach Ramsdell, he was off grid on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O'Neill and their two dogs in Montana.
Nobel Prize winner, Dr Fred Ramsdell was unreachable when the Nobel committee tried to call him to inform that he and his team has won the Nobel Prize for medicine.
On the day the committee tried to reach Ramsdell, he was off grid on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O'Neill and their two dogs in Montana, as per BBC.
The couple only came to realise about Dr. Ramsdell winning the price when his wife’s phone blasted congratulatory messages on Ramsdell Nobel prize win. The couple drove down to a small town in southern Montana in search of good phone signal.
"By then it was probably three o'clock in the afternoon here, I called the Nobel Committee. Of course they were in bed, because it was probably one o'clock in the morning for them there," Dr Ramsell said as per BBC.
Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine 2025 for their groundbreaking discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance that prevents the immune system from harming the body. Their work enables new treatments for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and improves transplant success.
Fred Ramsdell holds the position of Scientific Advisor at San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics.
After nearly 20 hours of unsuccessful attempts, the immunologist finally managed to connect with fellow laureates, friends, and officials at the Nobel Assembly.
The laureates identified the immune system's security guards known as 'T cells', which prevent immune cells from attacking our own body.
"Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said in a statement.
