A Nobel Prize winner didn’t even know he had won the prestigious award for more than 12 hours — because he was “living his best life” hiking off the grid in the Rocky Mountains.
Fred Ramsdell, 64, was one of three scientists awarded the prestigious 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for their discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our bodies.
But no one was able to reach him to break the news.
The blissfully unaware Silicon Valley scientist only discovered he’d secured the coveted prize when his wife switched on her phone at a Montana campground and let out a huge scream.
Ramsdell, a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, initially thought she’d seen a bear.
“I certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” he told the New York Times. “It never crossed my mind.”
Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, said it took until early Tuesday before he could get him on the phone.
“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 said.
“Fortunately, it was the Nobel Prize. He was very happy and elated and had not expected the prize at all.”
His company had earlier said he was MIA “living his best life” on an “off the grid” hiking trip.
“I have been trying to get a hold of him myself,” Jeffrey Bluestone, one of Ramsdell’s friends and co-founder of the lab, told AFP on Monday.
“I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho.”
Ramsdell shared the 2025 award with fellow American, Mary Brunkow, and Japanese immunologist, Shimon Sakaguchi, for their work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells.
With Post wires
