Last week, as the 2025 Nobel Prizes were announced, one of this year’s new laureates was blissfully unaware that his life had just changed. American immunologist Fred Ramsdell didn’t learn he had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine until days after the announcement was made, because he was camping off the grid with no cell phone signal and his phone in airplane mode.
In a subsequent interview with the Nobel Committee, Ramsdell recalled that he was camping in the Wyoming wilderness when the news broke. As they drove through a small town, his wife’s phone lit up with notifications, causing her to scream. At first, he thought there was a grizzly bear nearby. Instead, she was reacting to the news that he had just won the Nobel Prize.
Ramsdell would need another hour to confirm the news. “We still have to drive another hour to get to a place where we have cell service and WiFi,” he said. “We checked into a small hotel in southern Montana, and I got online and started making phone calls.”
Ramsdell’s co-winner, Mary E. Brunkow, also missed her moment—but for more modern reasons. She ignored the call from Sweden, thinking it was spam. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and I thought, well, this is just some kind of spam, so I turned it off and went back to sleep,” Brunko told the committee. She learned of her award hours later when an Associated Press reporter showed up at her door asking for an interview.
The Nobel Committee’s strict confidentiality rules, as well as the time difference between Stockholm and the rest of the world, have long made contacting laureates a logistical headache. Each year, committees scramble to get the announcement out before it becomes public, but history shows success is rarely guaranteed.
David MacMillan, the 2021 Chemistry Laureate, dismissed this important call as a hoax.
In 2021, one of the chemistry laureates, David MacMillan, also turned down his first approach in Stockholm. “I got a text message from someone in Stockholm with my name wrong and I thought it was a prank,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of naughty ex-colleagues over the years, so I just go back to sleep.”
When his co-winner Benjamin List called him to tell him they had both won, MacMillan still didn’t buy it and even bet $1,000 that the news was fake. (Of course, he lost.)
Paul Milgrom, the 2020 economics laureate, learned of his award when someone knocked on the door.
Nobel laureate Paul Milgrom turns off his cell phone at night and doesn’t receive any calls at all. “Even though I knew it was awards night, even though people had been talking to me about it, I said, ‘I’m just going to do what I do every night,'” Milgrom told the committee. “I turned off my phone because that’s who I am.”
Fortunately, his Stanford colleague and co-winner Robert Wilson lived nearby and took matters into his own hands. “Not only did he wake me up, he rang the doorbell and said, ‘Paul, they want to call you from Stockholm. You have a Nobel Prize,'” Milgrom said. It was two in the morning and Wilson forgot to mention that they had won the award together.
Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 literature laureate, has hung up the phone on the Nobel Committee.
When the Tanzanian-born British novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah received the call informing him that he had won the 2021 Nobel Prize for Literature, he thought it was a cold call and his initial reaction was one of disbelief. He wasn’t completely convinced until he read the announcement on the Swedish Academy’s website.
In subsequent conversations with the Nobel committee, Gunnar admitted that he was completely unprepared for the news. “I just thought, ‘I wonder who’s going to get it. I thought it was a prank, and I did,” he said.
In 2016, Bob Dylan did not respond to calls from the Nobel committee for several days.
When Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, it took the committee nearly a week to contact him. Emails went unanswered, phone calls went unanswered and even his representatives could not immediately confirm whether he was aware of the news. “I have called and emailed his closest collaborators and received very friendly responses,” a Nobel Prize official told reporters at the time.
Dillon made no public comment for several days, leaving the committee and the media to wonder whether he would respond. When he finally won, he described the award as “amazing and unbelievable” and said the news left him “speechless.”
Peter Higgs, winner of the 2013 Physics Prize, studiously avoids the spotlight.
British physicist Peter Higgs won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for confirming the existence of the Higgs boson particle. But the Nobel Committee could not find him. Higgs went out for a walk in Edinburgh, deliberately avoiding his home phone calls and the flood of attention he knew was likely to follow.
Higgs could not be reached directly because he did not have a cell phone or use email. The committee ultimately decided to make the announcement publicly, hoping to make the news known to him through media coverage. When reporters finally found him, Higgs said he learned of the win after neighbors congratulated him on the street.
