Fred Ramsdell thought a grizzly had wandered too close.
Deep in the pine-scented quiet of the Montana wilderness, his wife’s shout pierced the calm. He froze, half-expecting to see a hulking shadow moving through the trees. Instead, Laura O’Neill came running out of their tiny teardrop trailer, waving her phone in the air like she’d just caught lightning.
“You just won the Nobel Prize!” she yelled.
Ramsdell blinked. “No, I didn’t,” he said, certain she must have misread something. His phone had been on airplane mode for days; they hadn’t had a signal since Idaho. But Laura’s phone, perched on a sliver of reception, was lighting up like Times Square. “I have 200 messages saying you did!” she said, laughing and shaking her head.
And she was right.
While Ramsdell, 64, had been blissfully off-grid — camping with Laura and their two dogs in a remote patch of the Rockies — the Nobel Assembly in Stockholm had been desperately trying to reach him. At 2 a.m. Swedish time, they’d called to inform him he’d won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, alongside two colleagues, for pioneering work that transformed how scientists understand immune tolerance — a breakthrough now saving lives through new treatments for autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and Crohn’s disease.
But the call never went through. Nor did the flood of congratulatory texts from friends, family, and his team at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, the California-based biotech firm where Ramsdell serves as chief scientist. The company later joked on social media that its Nobel-winning researcher was “living his best life — off the grid.”
When Ramsdell finally reached civilisation — a motel in Livingston with a half-decent Wi-Fi connection — he was still dazed. “I certainly didn’t expect to win the Nobel Prize,” he told reporters, his tone equal parts disbelief and understatement.
For Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, it was one of the more memorable laureate hunts in recent history. “It’s never been this hard to reach someone since I took this role in 2016,” he said. His early-morning call had gone unanswered, and when Ramsdell tried ringing back later from his campsite, it was already 11 p.m. in Sweden. Perlmann, exhausted after the ceremony, was asleep. They finally connected the next morning at 6:15 a.m. Stockholm time. “Eventually, it worked,” Perlmann said, sounding amused.
For Ramsdell, a scientist who has spent his career quietly decoding the immune system, the setting could not have been more fitting. “We tend to go into the remote areas,” he said. “I spend as much time as I can up in the mountains.”
He and Laura had been winding down a three-week road trip that began in Seattle, tracing a rugged loop through Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana in their trusty Toyota 4Runner. Their travelling companions: a Gordon setter, a rescue husky mix, and the sort of silence that most city dwellers pay to find in meditation apps.
The couple’s plan for the next morning was simple — a six-hour drive north to their cabin near Whitefish, where they spend autumn and winter. No media blitz, no champagne receptions. Just the open road, pine forests, and perhaps a celebratory campfire under the stars.
“I was grateful and humbled by the award,” Ramsdell said. “Super happy for the recognition of the work — and looking forward to sharing this with my colleagues.”
In a world obsessed with notifications and breaking news, Ramsdell’s story reads like a quiet parable: that sometimes, history finds you not in a lab or at a lectern, but miles away from any signal — where the only breaking news comes as a shout from someone you love, telling you that you’ve just changed medical science forever.
Source: New York Times