The Nobel committee has been unable to reach a winner of this year\u2019s prize for medicine who is \u201cliving his best life\u201d on an \u201coff the grid\u201d hiking foray.<\/p>\n
Fred Ramsdell shared Monday\u2019s prestigious prize with Mary Brunkow of Seattle, Washington and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University in Japan for their discoveries related to the functioning of the immune system.<\/p>\n
But the laureate\u2019s digital detox means the Nobel committee has been unable to reach him and break the news.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Bluestone, a friend of Ramsdell\u2019s and co-founder of the lab, said the researcher deserves credit but he can\u2019t reach him, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been trying to get a hold of him myself. I think he may be backpacking in the backcountry in Idaho,\u201d Bluestone told AFP.<\/p>\n
The Nobel committee also hit a roadblock trying to reach Brunkow \u2013 both researchers are based on the US West Coast, which is nine hours behind Stockholm \u2013 but eventually got ahold of her.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked them to, if they have a chance, call me back,\u201d said Thomas Perlmann, secretary-general of the Nobel committee, at the press conference announcing the winners.<\/p>\n
The three won the prize for research that identified the immune system\u2019s \u201csecurity guards\u201d, called regulatory T-cells.<\/p>\n
Their work concerns \u201cperipheral immune tolerance\u201d that prevents the immune system from harming the body, and has led to a new field of research and the development of potential medical treatments now being evaluated in clinical trials.<\/p>\n
Sakaguchi, 74, made the first key find in 1995, discovering a previously unknown class of immune cells that protect the body from autoimmune diseases.<\/p>\n
Brunkow, born in 1961 and now a senior project manager at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, and Ramsdell, a 64-year-old senior adviser at Sonoma Biotherapeutics, made the other key discovery in 2001.<\/p>\n