Nobel Laureate Unreachable During mountain Hike after winning Medicine Prize
A scientist who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was initially unreachable by the Nobel committee while on a hiking trip in the mountains of the American West. Dr. James Ramsdell, 64, of Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, learned of the award from The New york Times while staying at a hotel in Montana on Tuesday, according to colleague Thomas Perlmann. He “certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” ramsdell reportedly said.
Ramsdell shared the 11m Swedish kronor (approximately £871,400) prize with Mary Brunkow of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan. The award recognizes their discoveries concerning the functioning of the immune system,specifically relating to T-cells – white blood cells that identify and combat microbes and cancerous cells.
The Nobel committee initially contacted Sakaguchi on Monday, but struggled to reach both brunkow and Ramsdell. A spokesperson for sonoma Biotherapeutics stated Ramsdell was “living his best life” and “off the grid” during a three-week trip through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. Friend and lab co-founder Jeffrey Bluestone added he believed Ramsdell “may be backpacking.”
This isn’t the first time the Nobel committee has faced difficulties contacting winners. Bob Dylan remained silent for days after winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2011, one recipient of the medicine prize had died days before the announcement. In 2020, committee members had to rouse economist Paul Milgrom from sleep to inform him of his win after failing to reach him or fellow laureate Bob Wilson.
