BERLIN (AP) — For some people. nobel prize winners This year, the following news has arrived knock on the door before dawn. For others, it is long awaited phone call We pay homage to a discovery made decades ago.
One of the medical award winnersDuring that time, I was vacationing in Yellowstone National Park with no cell phone service. It would be hours before he noticed.
The Nobel Prize is considered as one of the following awards the world’s most prestigious honor For achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, and literature. economy And peace. The laureate joins the hall of fame of Nobel laureates, from Albert Einstein to Mother Teresa.
Sometimes awards are expected. The winning candidates will either plan tentative press conferences or stay up all night in the western United States waiting for news.
Some prizes may feature well-known names, such as the 2009 Peace Prize winners. then US President Barack Obama or 2016 Literary Award Winner and Singer-Songwriter bob dylan — The natural sciences category typically includes people whose names the general public doesn’t know, and whose work is decades old.
Five of this year’s nine science winners were in the United States when the news broke. Some people were sound asleep.
Seven hours earlier than Stockholm, the two Japanese winners were awake and working when they received a call from a Swedish number. Some people thought it was a telemarketer.
wednesday chemistry awards It was the first year this year that the Nobel Committee contacted all three laureates before the official announcement.
Here’s how some of this year’s winners learned:
the sound of knocking on the door
When Associated Press photographer Lindsey Wasson knocked on the door of Mary E. Brunkow’s Seattle home around 4 a.m. local time Monday, the first thing that woke up was the scientist’s dog. Zelda’s barking woke Brancow’s husband, Ross Colquhoun.
“I don’t think he really understood what I was there for,” Wasson said. “And I said, ‘Doctor, I believe your wife just won the Nobel Prize.'”
Wasson’s photo We captured Colquhoun waking up Swing and telling him the life-changing news. She was one of three winners sharing the 2025 medical prize.
“Don’t say anything stupid,” she told her husband.
But it was true. In their research two decades ago, the trio discovered an important pathway the body uses to suppress the immune system, called peripheral immune tolerance. Experts call the discovery crucial for understanding autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
The next day, Associated Press photographers Mark J. Terrill and Damien Dovarganes headed to Santa Barbara, California, before sunrise to find physicist John Martinis. His wife Jean answered the door and told him to come back later. “Martini needs to sleep.”
“For years, we stayed up the night the physics prize was announced,” she told photographers. “At some point, we decided, it’s weird. We’ll see if it’s happening or not, but let’s just go to bed.”
She added with a laugh, “I was thinking about how to introduce this, like, ‘Do you think we should plan a trip to Sweden?'”
She finally woke him up just before 6 a.m. local time (13:00 GMT) and told him only that the Associated Press wanted to interview him.
“I kind of knew that the Nobel Prize announcement was this week, so I put two and two together,” Martinis later said. “I opened my computer and looked under the 2025 Nobel Prize and there was a picture of me with Michel Devorret and John Clark. So it was a bit of a shock.”
The trio won the physics prize For research on the strange world of elementary particle quantum tunneling It advances the power of everyday digital communication and computing.
Martini will earn you a trip to Sweden. The award ceremony on December 10th will be held in Stockholm.
hike interrupted
Everyone except Fred Ramsdell seemed to know that he had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Ramsdell was on a backpacking trip Monday, driving through Yellowstone National Park with his wife and two dogs, Larkin and Megan. He kept his phone on airplane mode, as he often does on family vacations.
A few hours later, while driving through a small town, my wife started screaming as notifications flooded her phone. She told him that she had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Mr. Brankow and Shimon Sakaguchi.
“I said, ‘No, that’s not true,'” Ramsdell told The Associated Press in an interview from his car the next day. “She said, ‘Yes, that’s right. I have 200 text messages saying you won the Nobel Prize.'”
Late Monday, Ramsdell drove to a hotel in Montana to connect to Wi-Fi and call friends and colleagues. He did not speak until midnight to receive congratulations from the Nobel committee.
He said he was surprised and awed to receive the award. But he has no plans to change his phone habits, which he says are important for his work-life balance.
call from sweden
The Nobel Committee calls the winners just before the formal announcement is made. Some people ignore Swedish numbers, like Brankow, who assumes a pre-dawn call is spam.
When the phone rang on Wednesday, chemistry winner Susumu Kitagawa was skeptical. “I thought it must be some kind of telemarketing call that I’ve been getting a lot lately, so I answered quite honestly,” he said.
The Nobel Prize announcement follows the literature prize on Thursday. Will the winner answer the phone?
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Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Mari Yamaguchi from Tokyo contributed.
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Associated Press Nobel Prize coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
