Nobel Prize winner Mary Brunkow thought call was spam

Mary E. Brunkow, a senior program analyst at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, ignored a call from Sweden notifying her that she and research colleagues Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, mistaking it for spam. “I disabled the phone and went back to sleep,” she said. Their work investigated how the immune system distinguishes between targets to attack and protect. “Their discoveries have been decisive for our understanding of how the immune system functions and why we do not all develop serious autoimmune diseases,” says Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee. Brunkow has served as program manager, genetics, at the Institute for Systems Biology since 2009.