The Nobel committee has been unable to reach a winner of this year’s prize for medicine who is “living his best life” on an “off the grid” hiking foray.
Fred Ramsdell shared Monday’s prestigious prize with Mary Brunkow of Seattle, Washington and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their discoveries related to the functioning of the immune system.
But the laureate’s digital detox means the Nobel committee has been unable to reach him and break the news.
Jeffrey Bluestone, a friend of Ramsdell’s and co-founder of the lab, said the researcher deserves credit but he can’t reach him, either.
“I have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho,” Bluestone told AFP.
The Nobel committee also hit a roadblock trying to reach Brunkow – both researchers are based on the US West Coast, which is nine hours behind Stockholm – but eventually got ahold of her.
“I asked them to, if they have a chance, call me back,” said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel committee, at the press conference announcing the winners.
The three won the prize for research that identified the immune system’s “security guards”, called regulatory T-cells.
Their work concerns “peripheral immune tolerance” that prevents the immune system from harming the body, and has led to a new field of research and the development of potential medical treatments now being evaluated in clinical trials.
Sakaguchi, 74, made the first key find in 1995, discovering a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.
Brunkow, born in 1961 and now a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, a 64-year-old senior adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, made the other key discovery in 2001.
In 2020 the Nobel committee had similar difficulties in contacting the winners of the prize for economics. When Bob Wilson’s phone rang in Stanford in the middle of the night, he unplugged it so the committee had to call his wife instead.
When the committee couldn’t reach his fellow winner, Paul Milgrom, either, Wilson had to go and wake him up. Footage from Milgrom’s security camera captured the moment he was told of his Nobel win, to which he responded “Yeah I have? Wow.”
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