First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025

“I thought there was a grizzly bear nearby”

Actually, what Fred Ramsdell’s wife was telling him, while on a hiking trip together, was that he had been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In this conversation, Ramsdell speaks about the benefits of working in the environment of biotech and the joy of finding talented collaborators.

Interview transcript

Fred Ramsdell: Hi, this is Fred.

Adam Smith: Hi, this is Adam Smith calling from nobelprize.org, the website of the Nobel Prize.

FR: Yes. Hi, Adam. Nice to talk to you. Sorry I missed your earlier call.

AS: Not at all. It’s lovely to talk to you. Delighted to find you. You had a pretty unusual way of discovering the news. How did it actually happen?

FR: It did. It’s funny, I talked more about this than I have about the prize. My wife and I were camping, high up in the mountains of Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park. We got snowed on and were completely off grid. There’s no service up there or anything, so my phone is on airplane mode. And we got out, which wasn’t necessarily obvious, but we got out and drove to Yellowstone National Park and saw bison, and antelope, and moose, and all sorts of great wildlife. And then we drove through a small town so my wife’s phone, which was not in airplane mode, blew up. I was out walking the dogs and she started yelling, and I thought there was a grizzly bear nearby. Turns out it was not a grizzly bear, and she said, “You won the Nobel Prize!” And I said, “I did not.” And she said, “Yes, you did. I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.” I was like, okay, apparently I won the Nobel Prize. So then we had to drive another hour to get to where I could get cell service and WiFi. We checked into a hotel in a small little town in southern Montana. I got online and started making phone calls, and it’s been pretty amazing through the last 24 hours, or about 18 hours now at this point.

AS: And you’re still making phone calls for you?

FR: Yes, I am. It’s okay.

AS: I suppose you had the chance when you heard this news, to turn around and go back into the wilderness for another day or two.

FR: I guess I could have, but no, no, this is too exciting and just too important to ignore. It’s been fantastic.

AS: It’s one of the best stories ever of hearing the news. It’s marvelous. It’s interesting because Mary Brunkow tells the story of how she did get the call at night, but she saw it was from Sweden and therefore thought it was spam, and so just switched her phone off. Your stories together speak to how little you were expecting this. It really wasn’t on your radar.

FR: That is true. Mary is a good friend. One of the first calls I made yesterday was to Mary. You may not know, but six, eight years ago, I, Shimon Sakaguchi and Sasha Rudensky won the Crafoord Prize. Also a family prize there in Sweden. We went over and it was fantastic. I think I and Mary and everyone involved in this assumed that that was the recognition that we were going to get. That was fantastic, we had one of the best times of my life. It was amazing. And thought, okay, that will be the recognition for this discovery. So we put Nobel Prize out of our heads completely. It was, definitely a shock. I’m still amazed.

AS: I suppose I can’t pry into your call with Mary, but I’d love to know what the two of you said to each other when you spoke.

FR: There was some colorful language used. Our spouses were both on the phone. We both were pretty amazed. One of her comments was: I think I need to go dress shopping now. Apparently you do, Mary, we have to dress up for this. We’ll have to figure out what we’re going to talk about and coordinate things a little bit. We’ll get together as soon as I’m back in Seattle and celebrate properly.

AS: One of the interesting things about you and the prize is that you’ve worked mainly in biotechs, in industry, not in academia.

FR: Correct.

AS: And I suppose that’s probably becoming increasingly common among laureates, but it’s still fairly unusual. Why do you find that environment has been more productive for you, do you think?

FR: You know, it’s a great question and I’m glad someone’s asked. When I was finishing my postdoctoral fellowship at the NIH, I was looking both at biotech and academic positions. Even then, back in the early nineties, I found the smallish biotech environment to be incredibly stimulating. What I loved about it was it brought together, and brings together, people with very different skill sets who are incredibly good at what they do. But you’re all focused on trying to make something that will eventually make it into the clinic and treat patients. Being surrounded by these people, having an incredibly team oriented environment with a really good focus, just very much appealed to me.

AS: That’s really fascinating. And I suppose also in the story of the regulatory T cells, there’s a lot of connections made between different areas. It’s different people coming together, and you can really see how you need that diversity of expertise and ideas to pull things together to make the connections, as well as individuals who are farsighted enough to see the connections.

FR: Absolutely. I’ll say it was interesting. When we figured this out back in 2000, actually late nineties, -98, -99 or 2000, it was very clear to us. In fact, we wrote in patents that if you could harness these cells, you could treat autoimmune disease. But back in the year 2000, no one was going to do gene therapy in vivo. No one was going to do cell therapy for autoimmune diseases. There weren’t even cell therapies for cancer at that point. It was too expensive, too hard, all the reasons, which were true at the time, which are no longer true. You could see the path but you couldn’t get there. Then by working with academic collaborators, Sasha Rudensky was a great friend and has been a great collaborator of mine throughout my life. Sasha and I could sit down and say, what can you do? Because there are things in academia that he could do that I just wasn’t going to do. So came back full circle, five years ago, Sasha and I, mostly spearheaded by Jeffrey Bluestone and a colleague of his at UCSF, Qizhi Tang, started Sonoma Biotherapeutics because now you can see a way to actually turn this fundamental discovery from the year 2000 into an actual drug. Now there are clinical trials running, patients are being treated, and we’ll see where it ends up. There are other groups doing it as well. Again, that there is this interplay between what you can do in a biotech and then what you can do in academia, and they really feed off each other very well, if you’re lucky and take advantage of it.

AS: Such an interesting point that in collaborations, you basically, when you come to collaborations, it’s asking, what can I do for this collaboration? What can I bring to this problem? What is it that I can do that’s special?

FR: Absolutely. People sometimes don’t want to give away anything. I’ve always thought, half of something is better than all of nothing. Let’s make this work and then, everyone will be happy at the end of the day if you can actually make it work. I still fundamentally believe that to be true.

AS: That’s great. Thank you. Okay. And lastly, we have to give a shout out to the scurfy mouse.

FR: Yes!

AS: That mouse contributed a lot too.

FR: It did. Again, this is one of these things which is, I’m really happy it’s, well I’m happy at multiple levels for the award, but, I’m very happy that this gives an opportunity to do things like, shout that out, because that mouse originated during the Manhattan Project in the United States at Oakridge National Labs. There are people at Oakridge National Labs, there’s a group there who kept that line of mice, not the individual mouse obviously, but the line of mice alive for, hundreds if not thousands of generations from the late forties until the nineties when we actually discovered it, basically, in their facility. And the forethought to do that and just the staying power to be able – because it costs a lot of money, right? – to be able to just keep that alive and keep that line going for that length of time thinking it was important, but not knowing exactly how, is just a testament to the people who actually did that work and had the forethought, or foresight to, maintain it. I’m really in awe of the fact that they were able to do that for so long. It’s incredible.

AS: What better story could you have to advocate for basic research and just the need to keep everything going, everything you can going.

FR: You never know. I mean, it’s one of hundreds of lines there and other ones are probably valuable as well. But this is, this is the one I know the best obviously.

AS: Fantastic. It’s been an absolute joy speaking to you. Thank you very much indeed.

FR: Lovely to talk to you.

AS: Okay. Bye now.

FR: Cheers.

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