Interview with the 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in physiology or medicine Fred Ramsdell on 6 December 2025 during Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden.

What was your childhood like?

Fred Ramsdell: My childhood I would describe as being incredibly boringly normal. I have two siblings – or had two siblings, one has passed much older than me – so I was a late single child. My parents moved to California when I was eight, I would say, in what is now called Silicon Valley. It was not called Silicon Valley then. It was orchards. I used to steal apricots on the way to school. Probably shouldn’t admit to that now, but I think statute limitations has probably passed. We lived in American suburbia. Really kind of boring, staunchly middle class, middle of the road family growing up. No one in my family had gone to college. I was expected to, though, which was kind of interesting. I’m not quite sure why, but I was.  

Average good student, not great. Never failed anything. Came close a couple times, but never failed anything. Basic, average student. Went through high school, played a lot of soccer, football in Europe. Was pretty good, but not good enough to make a living at it. I was in theatre. Pretty good, not good enough to make a living at it. I liked science. I was an inquisitive kid and asked a lot of questions and annoyed a lot of people. Science was my fallback career, if you will. We couldn’t afford for me to go to regular college, so I went to two years of a community college in California, which was an amazing deal at the time. I could work full-time and go to college and save money to finish my university degree down at UC San Diego, which I did, which was fantastic, which is where I got hooked on immunology. 

But I got hooked on immunology in college by a professor named Dick Dutton, who is an old time famous immunologist. Terrific guy, and terrific scientist. At that point, the tools to understand how the immune system worked were just beginning to evolve. I looked at it and thought, this is responsible for everything, all of all human disease and all human biology. It’s a slight exaggeration. We don’t know anything about it, so this would be fun to study. So that’s how I got into doing immunology and went to graduate school, spent four years at UCLA and that was a terrific education and learned an enormous amount and went on from there. But up through college I was very normal. I wasn’t a science dork. I didn’t do science fairs. I didn’t do any of that. I was busy playing soccer, doing theatre, going to the beach and trying to talk to girls. 

Do you see any similarities between theatre and science?

Fred Ramsdell: Between science and art, absolutely. Between science and the theatre, nothing, as far as I can tell. The only advantage is that I got comfortable talking in front of people in groups. I can be extemporaneous. You can give me a set of lines, I’ll remember them. But I also don’t need lines. One of my favourite moments in the theatre, which was terrifying at the time, is I’m on stage by myself and someone’s supposed to come join me and we’re supposed to go onto the next scene, except he doesn’t show up. So I’m standing there in front of an entire audience without anybody with which to have a conversation, but I learned all the lines in the play. So I would say my line, and then I would say his line in a way that says “I wonder…”

So I flipped it around. Eventually he showed up on stage, not knowing where we were. Other people finally came on. It was a terrifying moment at the time, but it was also this moment where, okay, how do I adapt to this? I’m standing here embarrassing the heck out of myself in front of hundreds and hundreds of people. How do I adapt to this? So I did. You learn to do stuff like that. That’s where the theatre was really useful. Now, I couldn’t dance and I can’t sing, so being an actor was probably pretty limiting at that point. I decided science would be a better choice. 

How did it feel to be the first person in your family to go to college? 

Fred Ramsdell: Going to college for me was basically an expectation of my mother. She instilled in me that, well, you’re going to go to college. I guess I wasn’t rebellious or smart or at that point, contrarian enough to say, no, I’m not. I just assumed I needed to. I had done enough other jobs that I realised most of them are things I didn’t want to do. It was a way to defer starting a real life and becoming a real human being. “I’m going to go to college for a while and therefore I will still be a student. This time doesn’t count.” 

How was your life in college and in grad school?

Fred Ramsdell: I’ve never gotten straight A’s in anything. Let me dispel that myth for a second. When I was in college, I had done well enough – and it was just kind of the crux of my entire life. I’ve done well enough to get to the next step, whatever that might be. In January or February of my senior year, I got accepted to graduate school. I got into grad school. I did the math – I really don’t like math – but I did the math and realised, well, I could be summa cum laude if I got all A’s in my last quarter in college. Then I thought – this is my second moment of brilliance – I thought, am I going to care in 10 years if I was summa cum laude? Not really. I’m already in graduate school, all I have to do is graduate. But my roommate has a very nice course load and he has a wind surfer. So we could spend pretty much the entire semester windsurfing in Mission Bay in San Diego. We did that, which was fantastic. I got really good at windsurfing for a while, and that was great. I literally took finals on classes I’d never attended and got B’S and C’s and I didn’t care. I graduated. I went into graduate school. It was fantastic way to spend about three months. Even if I wasn’t here, it still worked out great. 

What do you love about science? 

Fred Ramsdell: There’s the ability to look at a problem and try to find an answer. I like the challenge of that. I like trying to figure out what the correct question is, which is the hardest part probably, and then trying to figure out how to get an answer. “Is that the right answer, the complete answer, part of the answer?” I love the intellectual banter with the universe. That’s always been really fun. Today, in addition to that, it is the people I’ve met along the way. My best friends and some of my wife’s best friends are scientists that we’ve met through my work. 

The people are just spectacular. This may be a little bit more than you want to know, but when I got the news of the prize, of course all my friends texted me and emailed me and all this stuff. In 48 hours, I had more texts than I had in all of 2024. I consider my phone a device to communicate with the outside world, not for that to communicate with me. So in general, I don’t text very much, to the annoyance of many of my friends and my wife. The inflowing of support and congratulations and joy is probably as impressive to me as winning the prize. I was obviously shocked to win the prize, but I was so touched by the people who came out. Multiple people called me and said, “hey, I bought my tickets to Stockholm.” I said “okay, but you’re not on my list of people I’m inviting to Stockholm”, and they’re like, “I don’t care. I’m coming.” “Okay, this is great.” I had a lot of people who did things like that. It’s just the response of the people. To go back to your original question, yes, my inquisitive nature and the ability to answer questions and learn things for the first time, you’d be the first person to know something is really pretty cool if you’re a dork like I am. But now I would say it is the people you’ve met along the way. 

Is collaboration important in science?

Fred Ramsdell: When I was leaving my postdoctoral fellowship at the NIH, I was looking at both academic and biotech positions. I went to a couple of biotech companies, one in Seattle, Immunex at the time, which really opened my eyes about how you could do science in a very different way. I had always been exposed to the academic method of science, but in biotech, you can surround yourself with people who are much better than you are at many other things. I was never going to be as good a biochemist as the people who were there were, or a molecular biologist or many other things. I could do what I could do, and I was good at it, but these people were experts in the world at what they did. If we could work together, we could make some real progress. 

That became abundantly clear very quickly. Academia, you have freedom to do whatever you can get money to do. You still got to convince somebody what you want to do is a good idea, but you can do it, which is fantastic. But I like surrounding myself with people who are smarter than I am, so that I can help contribute to things, but it’s not all dependent on me. I think it’s a more efficient and effective way to progress. And this prize is the perfect example of that. 

Tell us a bit about your co-laureate Mary Brunkow.

Fred Ramsdell: Mary is a delightful person. Mary is a wonderful person. I’ve known her since mid-90’s. Coming back to teamwork, I came into the company, which was called Darwin Molecular at the time, and it got acquired by other companies. But I came into the company as the resident immunologist who knew the diseases that we’re studying and the biology of the immune system. Mary came in as a molecular geneticist. Together we worked on this scurfy mouse, which I’m sure we’ll probably talk more about. She did all the molecular biology and the genetics around that. I learned a ton from her doing that. One of the things I learned is it was a lot of fun to work with Mary. 

We had a great time doing this. She was incredibly enthusiastic. Her team loves her. We had a happy hour for the old team right after we got this. And people flew across the country for a four hour happy hour. People flew from Boston to Seattle, from Atlanta to Seattle, from San Diego to Seattle for a four hour happy hour to join the two of us. It was very clear that her old team still loves her as much as they loved her back then. To come back to the people aspect of the science, that’s just so wonderful to see. 

Have you faced any failures in your career?

Fred Ramsdell: Failures in my career. How much time have we got? Of course, tons of failures. Being wrong is part of being a scientist. We’re wrong all the time. One of the jokes that I use all the time, but it’s not a joke, it’s really true, is when we got to the point of trying to identify this gene, we had 20 possible genes it could be. I prioritised those genes. The gene that was responsible was the last gene, which means I could not have been more wrong in my prioritisation. It’s absolutely the most wrong thing I could have done. We got it eventually, so it was still there, but it was because there was nothing left. It’s not because I was smart or had any foresight. 

There’s plenty of times when I have been wrong. We have been wrong about so many different things. Every scientist is wrong about a lot of stuff. You only talk about the stuff when you’re right. No one publishes stuff that says “hey, this is my idea and I was wrong.” That never gets published. People always talk about what has worked, of course. When you’re wrong, you never know why, or you don’t have the right tools to prove that you were right. Also true. But it happens all the time and you just pick yourself up and you keep moving forward because that just means you need to look at it from a different way. Somebody said: “you can be right or you can learn.” I don’t always learn, so I’m not sure that’s actually accurate in my case. You’re wrong a lot. The baseball analogy in America, which probably doesn’t work here, is if you’re able to be successful one third of the time or three out of 10, you’re in the hall of fame. Science is probably about the same. We just don’t publicly show the seven times we fail. 

What advice would you offer to young researchers?

Fred Ramsdell: My advice with young researchers – anyone can decide whether it’s good or not, that’s up to the individual person receiving it – is fairly simple: really to just be in the moment and to pay attention to what’s going on. Don’t think about what you need to do or what you didn’t do or what just happened. My wife comments that I don’t hold onto things. She’ll say, you know, this, that’s still bugging me two days later. And I’m like, what’s bugging you? I’ve forgotten about it already. That’s just gone, let it go. I don’t think about what I’m going to do next. I try to – I say this, and yet I fail at this all the time – but my intent usually is to be in the moment and pay attention to what you’re doing, what’s going on around you. 

Sometimes it’s as simple as putting down your phone. I can remember when we didn’t have phones, so it’s not that hard for me. Being in the moment, you’re ready for things that happen to you. Fortune happens. I never underestimate the value of luck. Luck favours the prepared mind – there’s a lot of various trite versions of this, but they’re largely true. I wouldn’t be here without some luck, there’s no question about it. I think we were ready for that luck. We were prepared, and we were paying attention. Just try to pay attention. Try to be in the moment. Try not to be wandering in your mind. 

What are the qualities of a successful scientist?

Fred Ramsdell: To be successful as a scientist, I think you really need to be curious. You need to be inquisitive. You want to know answers to stuff that you don’t have a good sense on. You have to be stubborn because you’re going to be wrong and you’re going to not get through this. You have to have a long-term perspective. You can go months, years, sometimes making painfully little progress on something – and then something happens and it’s exciting. But if you need immediate gratification, you should not be a scientist. That’s not going to work for you, because there’s very little immediate gratification in this business. You’ve got to be stubborn and you’ve got to have a long-term perspective.

Beyond that, it’s not that different from many other lines of work. If you want to be good at something, you put in the time, you pay attention, you learn the skills, you advance by learning and understanding things you didn’t know. That’s not so different from being a chef, a journalist, et cetera. Those traits are very similar, but the inquisitiveness for sure is critical. Being a persistent, stubborn person is really important. 

How important is diversity in science?

Fred Ramsdell: I was actually thinking about this the other day. We are not the paragon for diversity in this field. I do think diversity is important because different genders, different ethnicities, different geographical locations, different socioeconomic backgrounds all colour the way you think about the world. The idea that people think about problems in different ways is incredibly valuable. I’m wrong 70% of the time, let’s just say that someone else is going to be wrong 70% of the time as well, but probably wrong in a different way. That gives you 30% chance to be right in a different way. So I actually think it’s incredibly important to have diversity.

How we get there is a different challenge for me. I’m not sure how you do that. Quotas, we have to have 10% of our scientists be X, Y, or Z, that’s not going to work, right? But I do think finding a way to encourage and enable and just get people the opportunity to become scientists is really important. I was incredibly encouraged when I was talking to the high school students here yesterday. It was three or four to one females to males, girls to boys. That was shocking to me. Someone pointed out that, of course, girls develop intellectually faster than boys, which is true at pretty much any age, but certainly at that age. So that’s great, but I was very impressed by that. I thought it was wonderful. I’m not sure how to get to greater diversity, but I do think it’s something we should be working towards to further that a little bit. 

I’ve just been handed a whole bunch of cash that I was not expecting. One of the things I’m going to do with that is I’ve already started to create a fund and somehow utilise that fund to help bring in additional people into science that don’t have the opportunities now. I don’t need a fund in Silicon Valley to help those people and those kids get into college. I’m sure some have a challenge, but there’s a lot of money in Silicon Valley. I’m less worried about it there. But I also spend a lot of time in Montana where there is less opportunity, less role models. There’s less science, for a whole bunch of reasons. I couldn’t do what I did if I lived in Montana. That just wouldn’t be an option. I’m trying to figure out how to actually utilise that. I haven’t figured this out yet, but to try to put my money where my mouth is, I want to try to find a way to do that. I’m just not sure what that’s going to look like yet. 

How did you learn of your Nobel Prize?

Fred Ramsdell: The stories get a little distorted, but they’re mostly true. I spend an enormous amount of time outside. I try to be outside more than inside. It wasn’t so easy when I was working in the lab all the time. It’s easier now. My wife and I would go backpacking and camping and sailing and skiing and whatever quite often, and often we will spend two or three or four weeks after the Labor Day holiday in the United States when most of the kids go back to school and people go back to work. We don’t have kids. We take our dogs and go out into the mountains, which is what we did. We were gone for almost four weeks in the mountains, and I had no idea when they gave out the Nobel Prizes. 

I know it’s around the 1st of October, but I don’t really pay attention to that because it wasn’t part of my thinking process. We were just gone off grid and we were in places where there’s no cell service. We weren’t in campgrounds, we were just off in the woods in the mountains. It snowed the night before or the night of announcing the prizes. I thought “I’m not sure if we can get out tomorrow, we might have to wait a day,” which was fine. We have a little trailer. We were dry, we had food. It was all good. Then we got up and I thought, well, I can get out. It’ll be fine. We get out and we drive through Yellowstone National Park and, and my phone’s in airplane mode, which it usually is, and we drive through the park and we go through a little town on the outskirts of the park. 

Laura’s phone loads up, but she’s not looking at it. We pull off in a little campground to let my dogs go, run around for a few minutes and take off. She’s in the front of the truck and she starts yelling, oh my God, oh my God. Technically we’re in grizzly bear country. I thought, there’s no bears here. What’s the problem? She comes outside with the dogs, and she has this big grin on her face. She says “you won the Nobel Prize.” I said “no, I didn’t.” Threw me a bit of an expletive in there. She said “I have 200 text messages from our friends that said you did.” I’m a scientist. I believe in data. Apparently I won the Nobel Prize. That’s shocking. I said my friends might play a joke on me, but not 200 of them. They’re not that coordinated, they’re not that good.

We weren’t in cell phone range of anything at that point in time. We drove another hour into this tiny little town in Montana, 5,000 people, Livingston, Montana, and checked in and I said, I know I’m early, but I kind of need a room with wifi like right now. The woman at the front desk said “no problem.” We get in and I start seeing all the texts and the emails, and I called Thomas Perlmann of the Nobel Committee back and of course it was one o’clock in the morning here, so he was asleep. So I left a message and said, “hi Thomas, this is Fred Ramsdell. I hear you’re trying to get ahold of me. Call me back.” I called a few other people. I called Mary right away because she’s a good friend, and started calling people and responding to people’s texts and emails. 

I tried to respond to everybody individually, which was a lot and took me a while. Somewhere in this process we decided we needed food. Not a lot of options in southern Montana, so we went to an Irish pub and sat at the bar. It was a crowded Irish pub because it was football game on Monday night. We sat at the bar and had fish and chips. I looked around and thought, no one in this room has any idea what just happened to my life. This is crazy. It was really pretty funny. The next morning, the woman who had checked us in, I think Laura told her that I’d won the prize. We saw her and she pulled up and she said “you really won the Nobel Prize?” 

I said I did. She said “I’ve never known anybody who’s won a Nobel Prize.” I thought “you live in a 5,000 person town in southern Montana. The odds are not high you’re going to meet anyone who’s won a Nobel Prize,” but I didn’t say that. She said “can I hug you?” I’m like “sure, that’s weird, but sure.” It was very sweet, super nice. That was my first little bit of, okay, my life is really going to be different now. It’s been quite different ever since. 

How do you maintain a good work-life balance?

Fred Ramsdell: I’m not sure I even believe in the term work-life balance. I know this blew up on social media. The good thing for me is I’m not on any social media, so I have no idea what people said about me, what memes are out there. I have no clue. I’m fine not knowing. People can make fun of me all they want, that’s great. I never think about work-life balance. To me it’s all life. I love the work that I do. It’s just part of what I do. It’s part of who I am. I don’t separate these things. This goes back to kind of paying attention and being in the moment. 

When I am doing experiments or reading papers or whatever, I’m in that moment. When I am out cutting and chopping wood so that I can heat my home all winter, I’m in that moment. It’s all part of life for me. I do have the incredible benefit and luxury of doing something that pays my bills, and more than pays my bills, that I really like doing. I get that that’s a luxury not everybody has. I totally understand that. I don’t think, oh, I’ll go off there so I can recharge so that I can come back here and be good. That’s not the way it works for me. It may actually physiologically work that way, but I don’t think of it that way. I just think of it as things I do. Science is one of the things I do a lot, but it’s just one of the things I do. It’s not different from the other things that I do.

What does time spent in nature do for you?

Fred Ramsdell: I have been a backpacker, hiker, telemark skier, sailor, whatever, for as long as I can remember. In fact, my boy scout troop folded, but our little patrol stayed together just so we could go backpack every month when I was 14 or something. I love being out there. I love the natural sciences. I love being outside. I love being in nature. I love everything about it, whether it’s weather, the animals, all of it. I feel incredibly comfortable. It’s not intimidating to me at all to be in grizzly country or whatever. There’s just something about being independent. I will backpack on my own. Usually I take a dog, they don’t talk to me very much. All of that is to me very comfortable and calming and very peaceful.

How does it feel to have helped so many people?

Fred Ramsdell: It’s incredibly humbling. The whole experience is incredibly humbling. I am the face of this, but obviously teams and teams of people were responsible for all the work that we were just awarded a Nobel Prize for. What we’ve done hasn’t really actually saved anybody yet. We are now at the point, within the last 12 to 18 months of actually trying to see whether what we discovered can cure people with autoimmune diseases like arthritis and MS and diabetes and others. We’re at the point where we’re in version one of trying to test that. Will version one be the thing that cures everybody? That would be lovely. That would be amazing. If version one doesn’t do it, versions two, three, or four, I’m pretty confident will, but we’ll have to see. The data hasn’t come through yet. It’s incredibly humbling really to have people express their gratitude for this. 

I had a cousin-in-law or something who thanked me for her aunt’s cancer therapy. I had nothing to do with that, but I kind of like the fact that people are now appreciating what science can do. I’m more the face of science than I am the specific discovery for Nobel to some people. I’m okay with that. If people appreciate what science can do to help drive understanding and eventually medicine, if this highlights that, that’s fantastic. I feel really good about that.

Watch the interview

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