US scientist misses Nobel call after mistaking it for spam

When Brunkow’s phone buzzed at 1 a.m. showing an international number, she assumed it was spam and turned it off, unaware it was the Nobel Foundation calling, as reported by The Seattle Times.

"Well, about an hour and a half ago, my phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought, well, that’s just, you know, that’s spam of some sort. So I disabled the phone and went back to sleep, and I don’t know," Brunkow said in a phone interview with The Nobel Prize’s Adam Smith.

Her husband did the same after his own phone began ringing repeatedly. It was only two hours later, when an Associated Press photographer arrived at their home, waking the dog and her husband, that the truth sank in: she had won a Nobel Prize.

Mary E. Brunkow speaks on the phone with the Nobel committee about winning a Nobel Prize in medicine for part of her work on peripheral immune tolerance, in Seattle, Monday, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo by AP

On Monday, Brunkow was one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries explaining how the immune system distinguishes between the body’s own cells and foreign invaders.

Her co-laureates are Fred Ramsdell, who worked with her at a biotech firm in Washington state, and Dr. Shimon Sakaguchi, a professor at Osaka University in Japan. The trio will share a prize fund of 11 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million).

Like Brunkow, U.S.-based scientist Ramsdell was unreachable when the Nobel Committee first tried to call him, he was on the last day of a three-week off-grid hiking trip with his wife, Laura O’Neill, and their two dogs.

O’Neill screamed when she checked her phone to see more than 200 text messages announcing her husband’s win. Ramsdell, who had his phone on airplane mode, told BBC’s Newshour that his first response when his wife said, "You’ve won the Nobel Prize," was: "I did not."

Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel Committee, joked at the announcement press conference: "If you hear this, call me," after failing to reach both U.S.-based laureates initially.

Brunkow’s award-winning research dates back to her tenure at Darwin Molecular, a Seattle biotech firm where she worked from 1994 to 2003 before it was acquired by Chiroscience and later Celltech R&D. If Celltech R&D had not closed its Seattle doors in 2003, Brunkow said she would still be working there, calling her colleagues and the research "awesome."

After the company closed, she transitioned from lab work to consulting and science writing before becoming a senior program manager at the Institute for Systems Biology. "I started not feeling like I needed to be in the lab so much, but I was very interested in how a large project comes together and moves forward."