Off-Grid, Asleep or Unreachable: When Nobel Prize Winners Miss the Call of a Lifetime
As the 2025 Nobel Prize announcements rolled out last week, 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 several days after the announcement because he was camping off the grid, with no cell signal and his phone on airplane mode.
In an interview with the Nobel Committee afterward, Ramsdell recounted that he had been camping in the wilds of Wyoming with his wife when the news broke. As they drove through a small town, his wife’s phone suddenly lit up with notifications, prompting her to scream. At first, he thought a grizzly bear was nearby. Instead, she was reacting to the news that he had just won the Nobel Prize.
It would still take an hour before Ramsdell could confirm the news. “We had to drive another hour to get to where I could get cell service and WiFi,” he said. “We checked into a little hotel in southern Montana, and I got online and started making phone calls.”
Ramsdell’s co-winner, Mary E. Brunkow, also missed her moment—though for a more modern reason. She ignored the call from Sweden, assuming it was spam. “My phone rang, and I saw a number from Sweden and thought, well, that’s just spam of some sort, so I disabled the phone and went back to sleep,” Brunkow told the committee. She only 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—and the time difference between Stockholm and the rest of the world—have long made reaching winners a logistical headache. Each year, the committee scrambles to deliver the news before the announcement goes public, but as history shows, success is hardly guaranteed.
2021 Chemistry Laureate David MacMillan dismissed the big call as a prank.
In 2021, David MacMillan, one of the Chemistry laureates, also brushed off his first contact from Stockholm. “I got a text from someone in Stockholm where my name was wrong, and I assumed it was a prank,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of mischievous ex-co-workers over the years, so I just went back to sleep.”
When his co-winner Benjamin List called to tell him they’d both won, MacMillan still didn’t buy it and even bet $1,000 that the news was fake. (Naturally, he lost.)
2020 Economics laureate Paul Milgrom learned of his win from a knock at his door.
Paul Milgrom, who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics, missed his call altogether after turning off his phone for the night. “Even though I knew it was the night of the prize announcement, even though people had been talking to me about it, I said, ‘I’m just going to do what I always do every night,’” Milgrom told the committee. “I turned off my phone because that’s who I am.”
Luckily, 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’re trying to call you from Stockholm. You have won the Nobel Prize,’” Milgrom said. It was two o’clock in the morning, and Wilson forgot to mention that they’d won the prize together.
2021 Literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah hung up on the Nobel Committee.
When Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Tanzanian-born British novelist, received the call informing him he had won the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, he assumed it was a cold call and initially responded with disbelief. He wasn’t fully convinced until he read the announcement on The Swedish Academy’s website.
In his conversation with the Nobel Committee afterward, Gurnah admitted he was completely unprepared for the news. “I was just thinking, ‘I wonder who’ll get it. I thought it was a prank, I really did,” he said.
In 2016, Bob Dylan didn’t return the Nobel Committee’s calls for days.
When Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, the committee struggled to reach him for nearly a week. Emails went unanswered, calls weren’t returned, and even his representatives couldn’t immediately confirm he was aware of the news. “I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies,” one Nobel official told reporters at the time.
Dylan made no public comment for several days, leaving the committee and the press to wonder if he would ever respond. When he finally did, he described the award as “amazing, incredible,” and said the news had left him “speechless.”
2013 Physics laureate Peter Higgs deliberately avoided the spotlight.
When Peter Higgs, the British physicist whose work helped confirm the existence of the Higgs boson particle, was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics. But the Nobel Committee couldn’t find him. Higgs had gone out for a walk in Edinburgh, intentionally avoiding his home phone and the barrage of attention he knew might follow.
Because Higgs didn’t own a cellphone or use email, there was no way to reach him directly. The committee eventually went ahead with the public announcement, hoping the news would reach him through media reports. When journalists finally tracked him down, Higgs said he had only learned of the award after a neighbor congratulated him on the street.
