Fred Ramsdell was parked at a campground in Montana on Monday afternoon after camping and hiking across the US Rocky Mountains when his wife, Laura O’Neill, suddenly started shouting.
He first thought that maybe she had seen a grizzly bear. Instead, O’Neill had regained cellular service and had seen a flood of text messages with the same news. “You just won the Nobel Prize!” she yelled.
“No, I didn’t,” said Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode, he recalled in an interview. But she said, “I have 200 text messages saying that you did!”
They had missed a 2am call from the Nobel committee that Ramsdell and two others had been awarded the 2025 prize for medicine for their research into the immune system. They also missed congratulations from their friends and family. His lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a pre-planned hiking trip”.
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Ramsdell (64) had not expected any important phone calls that morning and was offline, as he usually is while on vacation. His wife, on the other hand, preferred to be more communicative with her friends and family.
“I certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” he said from a hotel in Montana. “It never crossed my mind.”
The stop in Montana near Yellowstone National Park on Monday afternoon was nearly the end of a three-week vacation that crossed the mountain ranges of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Ramsdell, O’Neill, their Gordon setter and rescue husky mix had set off last month from Seattle in their Toyota 4Runner with a small teardrop trailer in the back.
At work, Ramsdell’s research has helped improve care for autoimmune diseases including some types of arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, he said. Outside of work, he likes to unplug in nature.
[ Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner on ‘digital detox’ hiking holidayOpens in new window ]
“I spend as much time as I can up in the mountains,” he said. “We tend to go into the remote areas,” he said, adding that he and his wife always looked out for bison, moose, elk and eagles.
When he got to the hotel in Livingston, Montana, on Monday night, he finally spoke with Thomas Perlmann, the secretary general of the Nobel assembly, about 20 hours after Perlmann first tried to call him.
Perlmann said in an interview that it had never been this difficult to reach a laureate since he assumed the role in 2016.
Ramsdell tried returning Perlmann’s call from the campground, but it was 11pm in Sweden and Perlmann had fallen asleep. They finally connected when Perlmann woke up at 6.15am Tuesday. “Eventually, it worked,” Perlmann said.
On Tuesday, Ramsdell planned to drive the six hours left on his trip to get to his fall and winter home near Whitefish, Montana.
“I was just grateful and humbled by getting the award, super happy for the recognition of the work in general and just looking forward to sharing this with my colleagues, as well,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
