Nobel Laureate Initially disbelieved Prize Notification During Remote Hiking Trip
MONTANA – An immunologist who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was unreachable for 20 hours after the Nobel Committee first attempted too notify him, as he was enjoying a pre-planned, three-week hiking trip with limited cell service. Dr. Ramsdell, along with two colleagues, was awarded the 11 million Swedish kronor (£870,000) prize for groundbreaking research into how the immune system combats infection.
When his wife,Ms. O’neill, first delivered the news, Dr. Ramsdell’s initial reaction was disbelief. “I did not,” he reportedly told her, prompting her to point to the 200 text messages flooding her phone confirming the announcement. The couple then drove to a town in southern Montana seeking a reliable phone signal.
“By then it was probably three o’clock in the afternoon here,I called the Nobel Committee,” Dr. Ramsdell explained to the BBC’s Newshour Program. “Of course they were in bed, because it was probably one o’clock in the morning there.” He eventually connected with the committee, his fellow laureates, friends, and officials at the Nobel Assembly.
The incident marks the most challenging attempt to reach a winner in recent history, according to Dr. Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly. A spokesperson for Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Dr. Ramsdell’s lab, noted he was “living his best life and was off the grid” during the initial outreach. Dr. Ramsdell himself dismissed the possibility of a prank, stating, “I have a lot of friends, but they’re not coordinated enough to pull off this joke, not with that many of them at the same time.”
This latest episode joins a history of unusual laureate notifications.Author Kazuo Ishiguro initially believed his 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature announcement was a hoax, while economist Paul Milgrom unplugged his phone during a middle-of-the-night call in 2020, requiring his co-winner to deliver the news via his security camera. Novelist Doris Lessing’s reaction to being informed of her 2007 Nobel Prize was a succinct, “Oh, Christ.”
