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A colleague accosted me at the coffee machine the other day with an urgent question. "Why are pine nuts so expensive?"

I promised to find out. And I did. But along the way, I discovered something remarkable about pine nuts.

They connect us to a world of remote villages and vast forests, ancient foraging traditions that are facing modern threats.

Pine nuts don't generally come from orchards, or fields, or plantations. They come from pine forests. (And pine nuts are expensive because most of these areas are so remote.)

The nuts are hidden inside the cones of certain species of pine, such as the mighty Siberian pine, which covers thousands of square miles of Siberia. A few pine nut plantations have been set up in Spain and Portugal, but they produce only a tiny portion of the world's pine nuts.

Leo Sharashkin, a Russian forester who now lives in Missouri, still remembers feeling overwhelmed the first time he saw this pine nut harvest. "We tend to think of food as coming from farms," he says. "We till the soil and get nourishment from the soil. But there, I was seeing all these trees that were laden with cones that took no human effort to produce!"

In the midst of this forest, Sharashkin says, you can't usually see the cones. The trees are thick, and the nuts are far up in the forest canopy. "But whenever I saw a tree standing in the open, it looked like a huge Christmas tree, with the cones hanging in the branches," he says.

Once a year, the pine trees drop these cones onto the forest floor, and entire Siberian villages move into the forest for a month or so to gather them. "It doesn't take any special equipment," Sharashkin says. "You go into the forest, you pick up the cones from the ground, put them into burlap bags, and then transport them to wherever they are being crushed to extract the nuts."

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Russia exports some nuts officially and others unofficially; truckloads of them are smuggled across the border into China.

China has its own pine forests. And it is the world's biggest exporter of pine nuts. Pine nuts also come from North Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. (Look at that list and you realize that good food can come from troubled places.)

There are a few American pine nuts, too. They're a regional specialty in the West, and people are harvesting them right now.

I reached Dayer LeBaron on his cell phone as he pursued pine nuts on a mountain range called Butte Mountain, near Ely, Nev.

A few hundred feet above LeBaron, pion (also known as pinyon) pines cover the mountainside. They are modest but hardy trees that you'll find across mountains and foothills of the West, from Nevada to New Mexico. The nuts of this tree have nourished people living here for thousands of years.

These mountains are public land, and in Nevada, anyone is free to harvest up to 25 pounds of pion pine nuts for personal use. LeBaron, though, purchased the rights to gather the nuts commercially from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. It's his family business: wholesalepinenuts.com.

One type of pion pine grows in Nevada; a different kind in New Mexico. But in both areas, pine nuts are deeply rooted in local culture, and in food prepared on special occasions.

"Especially Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's," says LeBaron. "If you don't have them, it's like taking turkey out of Thanksgiving. Or taking Santa Claus out of Christmas — it's almost that important!"

But this year's harvest has been poor, LeBaron says. Insects have been eating the nuts, and strange weather disrupted the normal harvest pattern. LeBaron blames climate change.

Penny Frazier, an environmentalist who lives in the Ozarks, in Missouri, says government land managers aren't doing enough to protect this forest.

"It's an incredibly productive ecosystem that has been misunderstood and not managed for its forestry values," she says. "We've lost close to half of that habitat, that ecosystem, in the course of 20 years."

Some of the forest was cleared to expand range land for cattle grazing.

Frazier, who calls herself Pinyon Penny, has set up her own business — pinenut.com — to sell American pine nuts. Sharashkin, the Russian forester, also works for pinenut.com. By promoting pine nuts, they're also encouraging people to appreciate, and protect, the forests that produce them.

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Dr. Paul Farmer and colleagues from Partners in Health and Last Mile Health visited Zwedru this month to start work on a new Ebola treatment center in Grand Gedeh County. Can you tell me more about that?

Dr. Farmer assured us they are standing with the citizens in the fight against Ebola. He is passionate about what the country is going through. We are very hopeful that it won't be long until he is back in the country to start work.

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The scope of intervention they have in mind is very important. Currently there is no treatment or testing center in the county. The Partners in Health testing and treatment center is very welcome. We look forward to working with such an organization and seeing our dreams realized.

The United States has started sending soldiers to build 17 Ebola treatment centers in Liberia. How are people reacting to this?

Given the experiences of the Liberian people in years of crisis, people will be a little bit apprehensive. What we learned so far is the military will establish Ebola treatment units in the country and mobile testing facilities. That is good news. Everybody is happy. But people are still speculating there might be another agenda other than establishing an Ebola treatment unit.

Liberia's chief medical officer, Dr. Bernice Dahn, placed herself and her staff in isolation last week after her assistant died of Ebola. What's your reaction to this news?

I'm not really worried. I think everybody knows what to do. But it sends out a very bad message. If the staff from the ministry is infected, it quite clearly demonstrates the weakness of the system. It will make people lose confidence in the system.

You and your family lived through Liberia's terrible years of civil war. How does this time of Ebola compare to those years?

We know exactly what it means when we talk about war. In a war, one can identify one's enemies and know how to escape. One can leave and hide. But you cannot hide from this. And if you hide with people in the bushes, the people you are hiding with may be infected. In a war, you can embrace others; you can care for each other. But this [Ebola crisis] is against intimate friendship and against love. In a war situation, caring for wounded family members is not limited by conditions such as is the case with Ebola. [In wartime] I have seen family members holding their wounded relatives in their arms, soaked in blood. Even as a health care worker, I have been overwhelmed with patients, wounded from war, soaked in blood, which I must care for with little or no PPEs such as gloves and without so strong a fear of being infected as is the case with Ebola. For many people, this is more than just war.

I will tell you something. The funny part — it is sad and funny — is if you ask people now between HIV or Ebola, what do you prefer, many will say, "We prefer HIV," even though there is no cure. This is how serious things are.

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Global Health

West Africa is a poor region, struggling to improve its economic growth.

It had been succeeding. Last year, Sierra Leone and Liberia ranked second and sixth among countries with the highest growth in gross domestic product in the world.

But this year, growth has stopped because of the spread of the deadly Ebola virus. On Wednesday, the World Bank released a report saying the epidemic's economic cost could reach $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if the outbreak spreads.

In such poor countries, that's a huge amount of money. The grim scenario is based on economists' estimates of costs, and it assumes that containment efforts will move slowly, allowing the disease to spread from hardest-hit Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone into neighboring countries. World Bank officials are hoping that "slow" scenario won't come true.

"With Ebola's potential to inflict massive economic costs on Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone and on the rest of their neighbors in West Africa, the international community must find ways to get past logistical roadblocks and bring in more doctors and trained medical staff, more hospital beds, and more health and development support to help stop Ebola in its tracks," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement.

The World Bank study said that no matter what happens in coming months, Ebola is already having a huge economic impact. Right now, it is killing workers and causing "higher fiscal deficits; rising prices; lower real household incomes and greater poverty."

Over time, the disease will have indirect consequences as people change their behaviors, according to the report. When countries get hit with widespread fear of contagion, people become afraid to meet or even show up for work. That, in turn, "closes places of employment, disrupts transportation, motivates some governments to close land borders ... and motivates private decision-makers to disrupt trade, travel and commerce by canceling scheduled commercial flights and reduction in shipping and cargo service."

This week, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are trying to call attention to the huge costs of Ebola. The organizations are holding their annual fall meetings in Washington. On Thursday morning, a news conference will feature the presidents of Liberia and Sierra Leone as well as the heads of the CDC, the World Bank, IMF, the United Nations.

Estimates of Ebola's potential economic damage come on top of Tuesday's release of the World Bank and IMF's assessment of annual global growth. The report noted that factors such as disease, debt, war and terrorist attacks are slowing global economic expansion. The forecast for this year's average global growth slid to 3.3 percent, down 0.4 percentage point from April.

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Broad channels of short-term economic impact from the Ebola epidemic, as laid out in the World Bank report. For a larger version, click here. Courtesy of the World Bank hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of the World Bank

Broad channels of short-term economic impact from the Ebola epidemic, as laid out in the World Bank report. For a larger version, click here.

Courtesy of the World Bank

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World Bank

Two Americans and a German will share the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a new type of microscopy that allows researchers, for the first time, to see individual molecules inside living cells.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded Americans Eric Betzig and William Moerner and German scientist Stefan Hell the prize for "the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy," which "has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension."

Nobelprize.org says:

"For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

"In what has become known as nanoscopy, scientists visualize the pathways of individual molecules inside living cells. They can see how molecules create synapses between nerve cells in the brain; they can track proteins involved in Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Huntington's diseases as they aggregate; they follow individual proteins in fertilized eggs as these divide into embryos."

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The academy says it is awarding the prize for two distinct principles. Simulated emission depletion (STED) microscopy, which uses a laser to stimulate fluorescent molecules to glow and another laser to filter out all but a small portion of the result, allowing incredibly fine resolution. That research was carried out by Hell.

Working separately, Betzig and Moerner are credited with developing single-molecule microscopy, a "method [that] relies upon the possibility to turn the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off. Scientists image the same area multiple times, letting just a few interspersed molecules glow each time," according to Nobelprize.org.

Betzig is a group leader at Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Va., and Moerner is the Harry S. Mosher Professor in Chemistry and professor, by courtesy, of applied physics at Stanford University.

Hell is the director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Gottingen, and division head at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, Germany.

Nobel Prize in chemistry