A Nobel Prize winner ignored the congratulatory call as she thought it was “spam”, while another is off-grid on a hiking trip and is seemingly unaware of the honour.
Scientists Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday, for work shedding light on how the immune system spares healthy cells, creating openings for possible new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments.
Dr Brunkow, a senior programme manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, was told she had won the prize by an Associated Press photographer who had turned up at her home in the early hours of the morning.
The 64-year-old said she had ignored an earlier call from the Nobel Committee, saying: “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought, ‘that’s spam of some sort’.”
Meanwhile, Dr Ramsdell, 64, a scientific adviser for San Francisco-based Sonoma Biotherapeutics, was unable to be reached as it is thought he is away on a backpacking trip.
Jeff Bluestone, CEO of Sonoma Biotherapeutics, described Dr Ramsdell as “one of the most humble people you’ll ever meet”.
He added: “It’s going to be great for us to toot his horn for him.”
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Dr Sakaguchi, 74, a distinguished professor at the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University in Japan, called his win a “happy surprise”.
At a news conference – which was interrupted by a congratulatory call from the Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba – Dr Sakaguchi said: “There are many illnesses that need further research and treatment, and I hope there will be further progress in those areas so that findings will lead to prevention of diseases.
“That’s what our research is for.”
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In separate projects over several years, the trio identified the importance of what are now called regulatory T cells – a class of white blood cells that act as the immune system’s security guards and keep immune cells from attacking our own body.
Scientists are currently using those findings in a variety of ways – to discover better treatments for autoimmune diseases, to improve organ transplant success and to enhance the body’s own fight against cancer, among others.
Olle Kampe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said: “Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases.”
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The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was revealed by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The physics prize will be announced on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on 13 October.
The award ceremony is set to take place on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes.
Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.
The trio will share prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (around £870,000).
