BERLIN — For some of this year’s Nobel Prize winners, the life-changing news came with a knock on the door before dawn.

For others, it was a long-awaited phone call recognizing discoveries made decades ago or a flood of messages that arrived only after a hike through Yellowstone National Park.

The Nobel Prizes — awarded for achievements in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics, and peace — are among the world’s most prestigious honors, joining a pantheon that includes Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa.

But behind the glory, many laureates’ first moments of fame were surprisingly ordinary, sleepy confusion, disbelief, or simply no phone signal.

One of the 2025 medicine prize winners, Dr. Fred Ramsdell, was on vacation in Yellowstone National Park when the Nobel Committee tried to call. With his phone on airplane mode, he missed the news entirely.

Hours later, while driving through a small Montana town, his wife’s phone lit up with hundreds of messages.

“She started screaming,” Ramsdell recalled. “She said, ‘You just won the Nobel Prize.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ She said, ‘Yes, you did, I have 200 text messages that say you won the Nobel Prize.’”

Ramsdell, who shared the medicine award with Mary E. Brunkow and Shimon Sakaguchi for their groundbreaking work on peripheral immune tolerance, didn’t speak to the Nobel Committee until midnight.

Meanwhile in Seattle, Associated Press photographer Lindsey Wasson delivered the news to Brunkow herself. Arriving at 4 a.m., she knocked on the scientist’s door. Brunkow’s husband, Ross Colquhoun, answered groggily — and was stunned when Wasson told him: “I think your wife just won the Nobel Prize.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brunkow replied when her husband woke her. Moments later, she learned it was true.

Across the U.S. in Santa Barbara, physicist John Martinis was still asleep when AP photographers arrived after sunrise. His wife, Jean, told them to come back later.

“For many years, we would stay up on the night the physics award was announced,” she said. “At some point we just decided, that’s nuts. We’ll find out in the morning.”

When she finally woke him up, Martinis checked his computer and saw his photo alongside Michel Devoret and John Clarke on the Nobel website.

The trio had won the physics prize for their research on quantum tunneling, which advanced the science behind modern computing and communications.

In Japan, chemistry laureate Susumu Kitagawa answered his early-morning call from Sweden “rather bluntly,” thinking it was a telemarketer. It wasn’t the Nobel Committee was calling to inform him he had won for his work on metal-organic frameworks.

Five of this year’s nine science winners were in the United States when the announcements were made, most of them asleep. The Nobel Committee says it always tries to reach recipients before the formal press conference but sometimes, the winners simply don’t pick up.

The Nobel announcements continue this week with the peace prize on Friday and the economics award on Monday.

By then, all the winners will know whether by phone call, knock at the door, or a very surprised spouse. — Agencies