Mary Brukow won the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2025 together with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, but being able to contact the US biologist to communicate the happy news was not so simple. The curious background was told by Brukow herself, caught off guard and in sleep from the call of the general secretary of the Nobel Assembly, Thomas Perlman: “The phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden. I thought: Well, it’s just spam or something like that. So I deactivated the phone and went back to sleep”.
Mary Brukow, wins the Nobel and does not respond to the phone
As told in the interview with Adam Smith, scientific director of ‘Nobel Prize Outreach’, only an hour and a half after Mary Brukow understood what was going on: “Then I heard my husband who was talking to someone and I received the news. Even the dog was confused. I didn’t expect to win the Nobel, I have not yet made”. “It was an extraordinary team work – he said – and my career in science has changed a lot since that job was done. They are not even more in that field, but it was an honor to have taken part in that initial work and I followed what is happening in medicine”, all the developments that arrived after those basic discoveries.
For Brukow and colleague Fred Ramsdell was just “a molecular pacchinata”, as the scientist defines it. “It is incredible how science has changed and the way we do today” the studies that led to identify Foxp3, the molecule that genetically program the T -regulatory cells to suppress the immune response. “Now it’s completely different from how we had to do it at that time.”
“Power of genetics – he added – we approached trying to understand the cause of the phenotype that had been observed in mice, so we were taking advantage of a mouse mutation that leads to interesting immune defects and then we were also able to connect” all “to human diseases that are very rarely found in children. It is certainly the power of genetics: it was obvious that there was a genetic overlap between human disease Certainly he helped, but in reality, once we had an idea of genetics and positions in which the mutant gene would have been found, it was truly a ‘molecular effort’ to reach exact mutations because it was only a very small genetic alteration but which translated into a rather profound change “. And “it takes a lot of different brains, which work all together – concludes Brukow returning to the importance of teamwork -. This is certain”.