Mary E. Brunkow, along with Fred Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi, just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance and regulatory T cells.
Brunkow, meanwhile, got the news of her prize from an AP photographer who came to her Seattle home in the early hours of the morning. She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel Committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’”
The reason why this is worth sharing (besides their fantastic work on the Foxp3 gene, which has implications for autoimmune disease treatment and cancer immunotherapy) is that the Nobel Prize always has a “Popular Science” publication with nice layman descriptions of what was discovered and why it was important. It’s an in-depth look at the discoveries at a university level I would say. Worth a read!