Off-the-grid scientist mistook wife's scream for a bear attack. But it was just her reacting to his Nobel Prize win
Ramsdell and his wife were heading back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car.
When award season rolls in, excitement runs high as people await the nominations and winner announcements. However, Nobel Medicine Prize winner Fred Ramsdell was in the "wildest" possible place when he heard his wife let out a scream after reading a text. Here’s the incredible story of how the 2025 Nobel Prize recipient learned he had won one of science’s most coveted awards on October 7.
Fred Ramsdell was on a camping and hiking trip with his wife when the awards were first announced. "My wife and I were camping, high up in the mountains of Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park. We got snowed on and were completely off grid," Ramsdell revealed in his interview with Adam Smith for the Nobel Prize website. Thomas Perlmann, the Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, had revealed that they had been trying to reach out to the laureate since the previous day when the awards were announced.
Interestingly, Ramsdell and his wife were heading back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car. Ramsdell's wife, who switched on her cell phone, was shocked by the wave of messages and let out a big scream, which scared Ramsdell, who assumed she may have encountered a grizzly bear. "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. Ramsdell revealed, "I was out walking the dogs and she started yelling, and I thought there was a grizzly bear nearby. Turns out it was not a grizzly bear, and she said, 'You won the Nobel Prize!' And I said, 'I did not.' And she said, 'Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.' I was like, okay, apparently I won the Nobel Prize."
When he realized the true magnitude of the event, he was "very happy and elated," as he had not expected the prize at all. Ramsdell shared the 2025 award with Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells. Interestingly, Mary E. Brunkow, who shared the same award with Ramsdell, had also had a similar hilarious reaction to receiving the call. In an interview with the same Adam Smith, Mary revealed that she had assumed it was a spam call when she saw that the number she received the call was from Sweden. She said, "My phone rang, and I saw a number from Sweden and thought, well, that’s just spam of some sort, so I disabled the phone and went back to sleep." Brunkow was not expecting the call to be from Stockholm.
Both Ramsdell and Mary E. Brunkow's reactions are a reflection of their curiosity and satisfaction with their discovery rather than external rewards or accolades. A study published by A. Suominen in 2021 explored the motivations behind researchers’ work, highlighting how intrinsic motivation often paves the way for a deep commitment to research, outweighing the pursuit of financial gain or public recognition.
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