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

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