Journalism of Courage
One of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine, Fred Ramsdell, is “living his best life” on an “off the grid” hiking foray as the Nobel committee has been unable to reach him, a spokesperson from Sonoma Biotherapeutics, Ramsdell’s San Francisco-based lab told news agency AFP.
Fred Ramsdell was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday along with Mary Brunkow of Seattle, Washington and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their discoveries on the functioning of the immune system.
But Ramsdell’s digital detox and a shining example of work-life balance has made the Nobel committee unable to reach him and share the news. A friend of Ramsdell and a co-founder of the lab, Jeffrey Bluestone, said that the researcher deserved the credit for the award but he hasn’t been able to reach him.
“I have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho,” Bluestone said, as reported by AFP.
The Nobel committee was also not able to reach out to Brunkow, another winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2025, and interestingly, both the researchers are based out of the US West Coast which is about nine hours behind Nobel committee’s headquarters in Stockholm. However, the committee was able to make a contact with Brunkow.
The secretary-general of the Nobel committee, Thomas Perlmann, at a press briefing while announcing the winners said, “I asked them to, if they have a chance, call me back.” The trio won the Nobel prize for identifying the immune system’s regulatory T-cells, which are also known as “security guards” of the human immune system.
