A scientist learned he had won a Nobel prize in medicine after his wife found cellphone service as they came to the end of a weeks-long backpacking adventure.
Fred Ramsdell was blindsided with the news after spending three-and-a-half weeks on vacation with his wife, Laura O’Neill, at about 8,000 feet in the mountains of Wyoming.
On their last night, the couple were driving through Yellowstone National Park when they stopped at a small town and his wife’s phone came into signal.
The device was quickly overwhelmed with hundreds of congratulatory messages about Ramsdell’s accomplishment, according to Wired.
‘She kind of yelled, “Oh my god, oh my God.” I was outside and we’re in grizzly territory, and I thought, “Bear? There’s no bear.” She comes out and says, “You just won the Nobel Prize,”‘ Ramsdell told the outlet.
‘”No, no, come on,” I said. She’s like, “I have 200 text messages”… We already booked a hotel room for that night. So we checked in, and I got online, and I tried to call the Nobel Committee. And of course, it was 1 in the morning there by then, so they were all asleep, so I didn’t talk to them until probably 1:30 am.’
Ramsdell was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside American scientist Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi from Japan for their groundbreaking discoveries in peripheral immune tolerance.
Their work helps prevent the immune system from harming the body’s own tissues, according to the prize’s website and their discoveries are credited with laying the foundation for a new field of research that has created new treatments for cancer, autoimmune diseases and more.
The scientist was unaware that the awards were being announced, explaining: ‘I don’t think about that’.
The laureates uncovered this groundbreaking genetic using mice born with a fatal mutation that caused their immune system to attack their own organs.
Ramsdell and his colleagues studied these mice and revealed the gene responsible, changing the medical research world forever.
‘We knew the implications of these discoveries 25 years ago, but the technologies didn’t exist to create the drugs that we can create today, and even if they did exist, there was going to be no appetite for an expensive, totally novel cell therapy approach to autoimmune disease 25 years ago,’ he said to the outlet.
He further explained how the oncology world has further evolved because of his findings and highlighted the work of Carl June and Michel Sadelain that involves cutting a cell out of a person’s body, such as a cancer patient, engineering it in the lab, and being able to put it back.
‘[To] have it do something that is, frankly, remarkable,’ he said.
Ramsdell also mentioned that the only thing he fears is that when an award like this is given, many people who worked on the project are not highlighted for their efforts.
‘I worry that when a prize comes out like this, way too much attention gets put on the three of us and not on a bunch of other people whose contributions are seminal, absolutely seminal to what happens. And I don’t even mean my team and Mary’s team at the company,’ he said.
‘Yes, obviously tremendous contributions. There’s a bunch of people I could name who’ve made incredibly important, seminal discoveries related to this, without which we wouldn’t be here where we are today.’
Ramsdell is the co-founder of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, a clinical-stage biotechnology company that develops T cell therapies to treat autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
Jeff Bluestone, Chief Executive Officer and President of the company, said: ‘Congratulations to Fred Ramsdell, co-founder of SonomaBio, and a valued friend and colleague.
‘Like many great scientists, Fred spent years working behind the scenes to identify the gene that caused devastating systemic autoimmune diseases in a little-known strain of mice.’
‘The discovery of the gene, FOXP3, changed our understanding of peripheral tolerance and led to a new field of immunotherapy.’
