His off-the-grid vacation was interrupted by a Nobel Prize

Fred Ramsdell was parked at a campground in Montana on Monday afternoon after camping and hiking across the Rocky Mountains when his wife, Laura O'Neill, suddenly started shouting.

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He first thought that maybe she had seen a grizzly bear. Instead, O'Neill had regained cellular service and had seen a flood of text messages with the same news. “You just won the Nobel Prize!” she yelled.

“No, I didn’t,” said Ramsdell, whose phone had been on airplane mode, he recalled in an interview. But she said, “I have 200 text messages saying that you did!”

They had missed a 2 a.m. call from the Nobel committee that Ramsdell and two others had been awarded the 2025 prize for medicine for their research into the immune system. They also missed congratulations from their friends and family. His lab, Sonoma Biotherapeutics, said he “was living his best life and was off the grid on a preplanned hiking trip.”