Rewilding, Resistance, and the 2025 Nobel Prize: Why Nature Still Holds the Key to Healing

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi for their groundbreaking discoveries about peripheral immune tolerance—how the body’s immune system learns to distinguish between self and non-self. Their work on regulatory T cells (T-regs) and the FOXP3 gene reshaped our understanding of autoimmune disease, cancer treatment, and the fragile balance that keeps the immune system from turning on itself.

At first glance, this might seem far from ecology. But in reality, it couldn’t be more connected. The immune system evolved in conversation with the microbial world. Every handful of healthy soil, every rewilded forest floor, is a living archive of the same biological negotiations—conflict, cooperation, and balance—that define immunity itself.

I am proposing the exploration of rewilded ecosystems as potential sources of new antibiotics. As antibiotic resistance accelerates, modern medicine faces a microbial race it is rapidly losing. Rewilded landscapes—where biodiversity and microbial interactions are reawakening—may hold chemical blueprints for the next generation of antibiotics.

The 2025 Nobel reminds us that breakthroughs often come from rediscovering the biological relationships that sustain life. Just as immune tolerance depends on equilibrium within the body, ecological restoration depends on balance within the Earth. By studying rewilded soils, we’re not only exploring nature’s capacity for renewal—we’re also investing in the next frontier of medical innovation.