Every October, a small number of scientists get the same kind of phone call: an unfamiliar number, a Swedish accent, and news that upends their week. This year's round of Nobel Prize announcements, which began Oct. 5 and run through Oct. 12, produced its usual crop of groggy, disbelieving laureates — and a few new stories to add to the genre.
Stanford neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth, who shares this year's physiology or medicine prize, was up late answering student emails at his Northern California home when the call came through. His two young daughters were already asleep, so he waited until morning to tell them, breaking the news in what one report described as "an unassuming tone": "I just got a phone call this morning that I won the Nobel Prize." His daughters lunged at him with shrieks of "oh my God"; his teenage son needed a beat to register it, then pulled him into a fist-pumping, high-fiving hug.
Co-laureate Peter Hegemann, a biophysicist at Humboldt University of Berlin, nearly missed his own good news entirely. He received an email from an unknown sender reading only "Please call me. It's important" — the kind of message most people delete on sight. What stopped him was the phone number attached: a Swedish area code he recognized from years of sailing. He called back and reached the chair of the Nobel Committee himself, just minutes before the public announcement.
Over in physics, Francis Halzen, the University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist honored for detecting high-energy cosmic neutrinos with a telescope buried in Antarctic ice, took his committee call from Italy while working on a grant proposal. Asked how it felt, he said, "It was a great surprise, and I obviously didn't expect it" — despite having been floated as a contender since 2013. Ever the pragmatist, he added, to laughter in the room, that he hoped the prize might help get his pending research funding approved.
The announcements continue through next Monday, when the economics prize closes out Nobel week — and, almost certainly, produces one more laureate fumbling for their phone at an odd hour.