‘Living best life’: Nobel medicine winner Ramsdell unreachable after announcement, is on off-grid hiking trip

Fred Ramsdell, one of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in medicine, has yet to learn about his award because he is “living his best life” on an off-grid hiking trip, a spokesperson from his San Francisco-based lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said.

The Nobel Committee has been unable to reach Ramsdell to inform him of the prize, which he shares with Mary Brunkow of Seattle and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University for their work on the immune system.

Jeffrey Bluestone, Ramsdell’s friend and co-founder of the lab, said, “I have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho.”

The committee also struggled to contact Brunkow at first due to the time difference between the US West Coast and Stockholm but eventually got through. “I asked them to, if they have a chance, call me back,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee, at the announcement.

The three researchers were recognized for discovering regulatory T-cells, the immune system’s “security guards,” which prevent the body from attacking itself. Their work on “peripheral immune tolerance” has opened new avenues for research and potential treatments for autoimmune diseases.

Sakaguchi made the initial discovery in 1995, while Brunkow and Ramsdell made further key findings in 2001, advancing understanding of how the immune system protects the body from self-damage.