The American scientist, Dr. Fred Ramsdell, was the last day of a three -week hike with his wife Laura O’Neill and their two dogs, deep in the Grizzly Bear Country in Montana, when Ms. O’Neill suddenly started to scream.
But it was not a predator who had disrupted the calm of their out -of -network holidays: it was a wave of text messages bearing the news that Dr. Ramsdell had won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.
Dr. Ramsdell, whose phone had been in plane mode when the Nobel Committee tried to call him, said the BBC Newshour program that his first answer when his wife said: “You won the Nobel Prize” was: “I did not do it.”
To which Mrs. O’Neill replied that she had 200 sms that suggested to her.
Dr. Ramsdell, as well as two other scientists, won the prize for their research on how the immune system attacks hostile infections.
The winners share a price worth 11 million Swedish Kronor (£ 870,000).
After Mrs. O’Neill received the messages, the couple went down to a small town in southern Montana in search of a good telephone signal.
“At that time, 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 in the morning there,” said Dr. Ramsell.
Finally, the immunologist was able to reach his colleagues winners, friends and civil servants in the Nobel Assembly – 8 p.m. after trying to join him.
“It was therefore an interesting day,” he said.
Dr. Thomas Perlmann, the secretary general of the Nobel Assembly, told the New York Times that it was the most difficult attempt to contact a winner since he assumed the role in 2016.
While the committee was trying to join him, he “lived his best life and was out of the grid during a pre-plane hiking trip,” said a spokesperson for his laboratory, Sonoma Biotherapeutics.
When asked by the BBC if he thought it could be a tip that his wife could play on him, Dr. Ramsdell said: “I have a lot of friends, but they are not coordinated enough to make this joke, not with many of them at the same time.”
It was the last incident of an often comical history of learning the winners that they had won the prize.
Author Kazuo Ishiguro thought that the news he had won the 2017 Nobel Literature Prize was a hoax, until the BBC confirms it on appeal with him.
In 2020, economist Paul Milgrom disconnected the phone when the Nobel Committee called – in the middle of the night – to tell him that he had won the Nobel for the economy.
Instead, his co-laureate Bob Wilson was forced to go to Milgrom, dressed in his pajamas and deliver the news through the security camera on his front door.
When a journalist informed the novelist Doris Lessing, she won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, she replied: “Oh, Christ”.
