Nobel committee unable to reach medicine laureate 'living his best life' on hiking trip
Ramsdell’s digital detox appears to have kept him beyond the reach of the Nobel Committee.
The Nobel Committee has been unable to contact one of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Medicine, who is reportedly "living his best life" on an off-the-grid hiking trip, said a spokesperson from his San Francisco-based lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics.
Fred Ramsdell, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Mary Brunkow of Seattle, USA, and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University, Japan, was recognised for groundbreaking discoveries related to the functioning of the human immune system.
However, Ramsdell's digital detox appears to have kept him beyond the reach of the Nobel Committee.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
Jeffrey Bluestone, co-founder of Sonoma Biotherapeutics and a close friend of Ramsdell, told AFP that he had also failed to contact the laureate.
"I have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho," he said.
The Nobel Committee also initially struggled to reach Brunkow, as both US-based winners are located on the West Coast, nine hours behind Stockholm. Eventually, the committee managed to contact her.
This year, the three won the Nobel Prize for identifying the immune system's "security guards," known as regulatory T-cells, which play a critical role in maintaining "peripheral immune tolerance" — a process that prevents the immune system from attacking the body's own tissues.
Their pioneering work has opened a new field of immunological research and paved the way for potential medical treatments now under clinical evaluation.
Sakaguchi, 74, made the first major breakthrough in 1995 when he discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Brunkow, 63, now a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, 64, a senior adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, made another key discovery in 2001, further advancing the understanding of immune regulation.
However, this is not the first time the Nobel Committee has faced challenges contacting laureates. In 2020, when the Nobel Prize in Economics was announced, Stanford professor Bob Wilson initially ignored calls from the committee, prompting them to reach his wife.
