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‘Don’t be ridiculous': How medicine Nobel winners for 2025 reacted to the news
Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr Shimon Sakaguchi won for their discoveries that can help prevent the immune system from mistakenly harming one's own body
From a humble “happy surprise” to simply “don’t be ridiculous!”, reactions were quite varied from the medical scientists who won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday, October 6.
Mary E Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell and Dr Shimon Sakaguchi won for their discoveries that can help prevent the immune system from mistakenly harming one's own body, thus not reacting adversely to medicines for instance.
When Sakaguchi, 74, who is a distinguished professor at Osaka University in Japan, got a call from Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel committee, he “sounded incredibly grateful”.
‘Did not expect it yet’
Sakaguchi later at a press conference called the win “a happy surprise". He modestly said he thought he'd have to wait “until the research makes more contributions”.
It was during the press meet that he got a call from Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who congratulated him and asked about the timeframe for the research to be applied to, for example, cancer treatment.
“Hopefully we can reach that stage in about 20 years, though I’m not sure if will still be around,” Sakaguchi told the PM, “But science will advance and by that time cancer will no longer be scary but treatable."
The prize committee's secretary-general said he could only leave voicemails for Brunkow, 64, a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle; and Ramsdell, also 64 and a scientific adviser for Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco.
Both of them are Americans, and it was early hours in the US.
'I thought it's just some spam call'
Brunkow then got the news from a news agency photographer who reached his home in Seattle early morning.
“My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort’,” she told the AP photographer. The Nobel committee sits in Sweden.
Her husband, Ross Colquhoun, shared her actual reaction: “When I told Mary she won, she said, ‘don’t be ridiculous!’”
Ramsdell was unreachable by AP for now as the announcement came in the early hours, US time.
“Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee, said.
When will they get the prize?: The award ceremony will be held December 10, the death anniversary of Alfred Nobel, who founded the prizes being a wealthy Swedish industrialist and the inventor of dynamite. He died in 1896.
How much award money will they get?: The trio will share prize money of 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million).
The award is the first of the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements and was announced by a panel at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.
Next, the Nobel physics prize will be announced on Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics on October 13.
