The Professor Who Hung Up on the Nobel Committee — Because She Thought It Was Spam

 At 1 a.m. in Seattle, Professor Mary E. Brunkow’s phone buzzed insistently on her bedside table.

A call from Sweden.
She squinted at the screen, sighed, and muttered, “Probably another robocall,” before rolling over and going back to sleep.

Professor Mary E. Brunkow - AP

In the next room, her husband Ross Colquhoun’s phone also began to ring — same foreign number, same eerie timing. He ignored it too.
Neither of them knew that this was the call — the one that turns scientists into legends.

It wasn’t until a photographer from the Associated Press appeared on their doorstep hours later, startling the couple’s dog and half the neighborhood, that reality began to sink in.
“When I told her she’d just won the Nobel Prize,” Ross recalled, “she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’”

Brunkow refused to let the photographer in until she saw an official press release from Stockholm slid under the door. “You can’t be too careful,” she later joked. Only at 4:30 a.m., coffee in hand, did she finally answer a follow-up call from Adam Smith of the Nobel Committee — this time convinced it wasn’t someone trying to sell her a timeshare in Malmö.

The Nobel Prize That Almost Went to Voicemail

The call was to tell her that she, alongside Dr. Fred Ramsdell of the U.S. and Professor Shimon Sakaguchi of Japan, had won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a discovery that reshaped modern immunology.

The trio were recognized for unraveling the mystery of peripheral immune tolerance — a fine-tuned mechanism that helps the body fight off invaders without turning against itself.

For decades, scientists believed immune balance was maintained mainly through “central tolerance” — a process happening in the thymus gland. But the work of Brunkow, Ramsdell, and Sakaguchi revealed a more sophisticated system at play throughout the body.

It all started in 1995, when Sakaguchi discovered a new class of immune cells called regulatory T cells (T-regs). In 2001, Brunkow and Ramsdell identified the genetic culprit behind a fatal immune disorder: a mutation in the Foxp3 gene. Two years later, Sakaguchi connected their discoveries, proving that Foxp3 was the master switch controlling the growth of these T-regs — the body’s peacekeepers, keeping the immune system from launching friendly fire.

Their collective work opened doors to therapies for autoimmune diseases, cancer, and organ transplantation.
“Without these discoveries, our understanding of why most of us aren’t constantly under immune attack would be incomplete,” said Olle Kämpe, chair of the Nobel Committee.

A Scientist Who Never Checked Her Missed Calls

Brunkow, born in 1961, earned her Ph.D. at Princeton University and now works at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. She’s known among colleagues not for self-promotion, but for her calm, understated curiosity — and for never answering her phone.

“She’s the kind of scientist who forgets her own birthday but remembers every base pair in the Foxp3 sequence,” a colleague joked.

Her modesty makes her the opposite of the stereotypical Nobel laureate. While others might dream of gold medals and Stockholm ceremonies, Brunkow seems genuinely happier at her lab bench, surrounded by beakers and her dog sleeping in the corner.

“She’s never chased fame,” said a former student. “Fame had to chase her — and even then, it had to call twice.”

The Courage to Question What Others Ignore

Long before the Nobel, Brunkow’s scientific bravery had already shown.
As a graduate student in the late 1980s, she took on gene H19 — a mysterious strand of DNA most scientists dismissed as “junk.”

Under the mentorship of molecular biologist Shirley M. Tilghman, who later became Princeton’s president, Brunkow helped prove that H19 wasn’t trash at all but a key player in genetic imprinting — how certain genes are activated or silenced in development.

“Mary was bold, curious, and unafraid to look foolish,” Tilghman recalled. “Back then, we were studying what turned out to be the first long noncoding RNA. Everyone thought it was meaningless. She didn’t.”

Brunkow’s early defiance of conventional wisdom has since become part of Princeton lore — proof that great discoveries often begin with someone refusing to accept the word ‘junk’.

The Glory That Found Her Anyway

When the Nobel Committee’s announcement went public on October 6, the prize — worth 11 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million) — was split equally among the three laureates. They’ll receive their medals and diplomas at the ceremony on December 10.

Asked how she felt about joining the pantheon of Nobel winners, Brunkow reportedly smiled and said,

“Honestly, I’m just glad my students finally believe me when I tell them to answer unknown numbers.”

In a world obsessed with recognition, Mary E. Brunkow is a quiet reminder that science is — and should remain — an act of wonder, not of ego.

Because sometimes, the people least interested in fame are the ones who deserve it most.
And sometimes, the world has to wake you — and your dog — just to tell you so.

Dawn Ave (Seattle Times, AP, Princeton Uni)