Nobel Prize winner learnt of award off-grid – and thought his startled wife had seen a bear

After hearing his wife scream while hiking, American scientist Fred Ramsdell thought she spotted a grizzly bear.

But, having just switched on her phone, she had discovered he had won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, one of the most coveted prizes in science.

Mr Ramsdell won the medicine award on Monday, along with American scientist Mary Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi from Japan, for their work on how the immune system spares healthy cells.

However, the Nobel Assembly were unable to reach Mr Ramsdell and his wife as they were off-grid in the backcountry of Wyoming.

Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly at the awarding body Karolinska Institute, said it took until Tuesday morning to reach them.

He shared that the couple were walking back to their hotel when they stopped to fix something on their car, and she switched on her cell phone and saw the messages.

“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,” Mr Perlmann told Reuters.

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

Mr Ramsdell, Ms Brunknow, and Mr Sakaguchi’s discoveries relate to peripheral immune tolerance and could create openings for new autoimmune disease and cancer treatments.

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Marie Wahren-Herlenius, a rheumatology professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, explained their work as “how we keep our immune system under control so we can fight all imaginable microbes and still avoid autoimmune disease”.

The institute said all three laureates brought to the fore so-called regulatory T cells, a class of white blood cells that act as the immune system’s security guards that keep immune cells from attacking the body.

It’s not the first time that Nobel Prize announcements haven’t gone smoothly: Bob Dylan became the first musician ever to be awarded the prize in literature, and ended up ignoring it for weeks.

When he did break his silence, he said he was “speechless”.

And in 2011, Canadian immunologist Ralph M Steinman was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine – three days after he died of pancreatic cancer.