US scientist Dr Fred Ramsdell was on the last day of a three-week hike with his wife Laura O’Neill and their two dogs, deep in Montana’s grizzly bear country, when Ms O’Neill suddenly started screaming.
But it was not a predator that had disturbed the quiet of their off-grid holiday: it was a flurry of text messages bearing the news that Dr Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for medicine.
Dr Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode when the Nobel committee tried to call him, told the BBC’s Newshour Programme that his first response when his wife said, “You’ve won the Nobel prize” was: “I did not.”
To which Ms O’Neill replied that she had 200 text messages that suggested he had.
Dr Ramsdell, along with two other scientists, won the prize for their research into how the immune system attacks hostile infections.
The winners share a prize fund worth 11m Swedish kronor (£870,000).
After Ms O’Neill received the messages, the couple drove down to a small town in southern Montana in search of good phone signal.
“By then it was probably three o’clock in the afternoon here, I called the Nobel Committee. Of course they were in bed, because it was probably one o’clock in the morning there,” Dr Ramsell said.
Eventually, the immunologist was able to reach his fellow laureates, friends and officials at the Nobel Assembly – 20 hours after they first tried to reach him.
“So it was an interesting day,” he said.
Dr Thomas Perlmann, the secretary-general of the Nobel Assembly, told the New York Times it was the most difficult attempt to contact a winner since he assumed the role in 2016.
While the committee was trying to reach him, he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip,” a spokesperson for his lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said.
When asked by the BBC whether he thought it might be a trick that his wife might play on him, Dr Ramsdell said: “I have a lot of friends, but they’re not coordinated enough to pull off this joke, not with that many of them at the same time.”
It was the latest incident in an often comic history of laureates learning they had won the prize.
Author Kazuo Ishiguro thought that news he had won the 2017 Nobel Prize for literature was a hoax, until the BBC confirmed it in a call with him.
In 2020, economist Paul Milgrom unplugged the phone when the Nobel committee called – in the middle of the night – to tell him he had won the Nobel for economics.
Instead, his co-winner Bob Wilson was forced to walk over to Milgrom’s house, dressed in his pyjamas, and deliver the news through the security camera on his front door.
When a journalist informed the novelist Doris Lessing she had won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature, she responded: “Oh, Christ.”
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