Bear scare! Nobel Prize winner’s wife startles him by screaming on receiving big news

Fred Ramsdell, one of the three scientists who won the 2025 Nobel Medicine Prize, thought her wife spotted a grizzly bear in the wild while on his “off the grid” vacation, only to discover that he had won the most coveted award in science. Ramsdell, along with Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi, won the award for their work that demonstrated how the immune system spares healthy cells. Ramsdell could not be reached by the Nobel Assembly after the award was announced on Monday (Oct 6), as he was on a camping and hiking trip with his wife.

Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, said it took until Tuesday morning before he could reach the laureate, who was completely off-grid when the award was announced the previous day.

Perlmann said Ramsdell and his wife were on their way back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something in their car. She then switched on her cell phone and saw the messages regarding her husband’s win.

“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 told Reuters. “Fortunately, it was the Nobel Prize. He was very happy and elated and had not expected the prize at all.”

It is not the first time Nobel announcements have had hiccups. In 2016, poet and musician Bob Dylan ignored his Nobel literature prize for weeks. In 2011, it was found that a medicine prize winner had died days before the announcement.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to the three researchers for their collective work in understanding immune system regulation, specifically the role of “regulatory T-cells” in maintaining immune tolerance. This discovery has opened up new possibilities in medicine, leading to clinical trials exploring potential treatments. In 1995, Sakaguchi made the first breakthrough by identifying a new class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases. Ramsdell and Brunkow furthered this research in 2001, contributing to the development of what has become a promising area of medical study.