STOCKHOLM — A west suburban man is among the three winners of the 2025 Nobel Prize in medicine for work on peripheral immune tolerance.
On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their significant findings on peripheral immune tolerance.
Ramsdell was born in Elmhurst, Illinios. He is a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco.
Brunkow is presently a senior program manager at Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology, while Sakaguchi holds a prestigious position at Osaka University’s Immunology Frontier Research Center in Japan.
According to Thomas Perlmann, Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, he was able to contact Sakaguchi by phone on Monday morning. However, he left voicemail messages for Brunkow and Ramsdell.
Peripheral immune tolerance serves as a crucial mechanism in preventing the immune system from misbehaving and targeting the body’s own tissues rather than attacking external threats.
The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
The previous year’s Nobel Prize was awarded to American researchers Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for identifying microRNA, minute strands of genetic material that function as switches, regulating cellular activities.
The Nobel Prize announcements will proceed with the physics award on Tuesday, the chemistry award on Wednesday, and the literature award on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize is set to be revealed on Friday, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced on October 13.
The award ceremony will be held Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes. Nobel was a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.
The trio will share the prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).
A hike interrupted
Everyone but Fred Ramsdell seemed to know he had just won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Ramsdell was away on a backpacking trip Monday, driving through Yellowstone National Park with his wife and two dogs, Larkin and Megan. He kept his cellphone in airplane mode as he often does on family trips.
As they drove through a small town hours later, his wife started screaming as notifications flooded her phone. She told him he’d just won the Nobel Prize in medicine alongside Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi.
“I said, ‘No, I didn’t,'” Ramsdell told the AP in an interview the following day from his car. “She said, ‘Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.'”
Later Monday, Ramsdell drove to a Montana hotel to connect to Wi-Fi and call friends and colleagues. He didn’t speak with the Nobel committee to get their congratulations until midnight.
He said he was stunned and awed to receive the recognition. But he has no plans to change his phone habits, which he says are important for work-life balance.
Dazio reported from Berlin.
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