"When Fred Ramsdell, 64, was named a Nobel Prize winner earlier this week, he was deep in the Wyoming mountains, blissfully offline and surrounded by fresh snow. The next day, as he was wrapping up a three-week backpacking trip with his wife, her phone began to light up with hundreds of messages about the good news: Ramsdell, along with Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi, had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries that reshaped immunology."
"Ramsdell tells WIRED he was completely unaware that the Nobel Prizes were being announced, let alone that the Nobel committee was trying to get in touch with him. Sonoma Biotherapeutics, the biotechnology firm he co-founded, told reporters that Ramsdell was "was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip." When the news finally reached him, Ramsdell says he was shocked."
"These "scurfy" mice were born with a fatal mutation that unleashed their immune systems against their own organs. In the 1990s, Ramsdell and Brunkow, who were working at a Seattle biotech company, identified the gene responsible-a breakthrough that paved the way for today's generation of cell therapies that target cancer as well as other diseases by retraining immune cells rather than destroying them."
Fred Ramsdell, 64, was named a Nobel Prize winner while backpacking and was initially unaware of the announcement. He, Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel Prize for discoveries about how the immune system learns to spare its own tissues, called peripheral immune tolerance. Their work focused on 'scurfy' mice, descendants of a World War II-era radiation experiment at Oak Ridge, which carried a fatal mutation that unleashed autoimmunity. In the 1990s Ramsdell and Brunkow identified the responsible gene at a Seattle biotech. The discovery enabled modern cell therapies that retrain immune cells to treat cancer and other diseases.
Read at WIRED
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