Bioscience Research and the Arkansas Delta

Between Waldenburg and Amagon

The Arkansas Delta. That underachieving older sibling to the state’s golden children –  the Ozarks and the Ouachitas. You know, the ones we clean up and shuffle out for guests.

The Delta isn’t quite Chuck Cunningham to Arkansas’ Happy Days, but it is perhaps Cinderella.

Stretching from the Missouri bootheel to the Louisiana line (too often we tend to think of the Delta strictly as southeast Arkansas), still it’s overlooked. It’s population is in decline. In a tourism brochure kind of way, it’s much less sexy.

But there’s something about how the sky opens up once you pass Bald Knob on Highway 67 — sort of like Arkansas’ own Big Sky Country. And Jackson County is the gateway. Something about the rice-mill skylines that welcome drivers approaching towns like Weiner. (Yes, a town called Weiner…hardy har.)

It was against this backdrop of a beautiful, blue Friday that INOV8 attended the Arkansas Biosciences Institute Fall Research Symposium at ASU in Jonesboro.

Celebrating its fifth anniversary, ABI — an IA research partner — broke ground Saturday on a new innovation center. East Arkansas isn’t done just yet.

But on Friday, John Peters with Proctor & Gamble’s R&D division was the headliner. A member of the ABI board of advisors, Peters spoke on the challenges and choices involved with promoting good health. Yesterday, INOV8 chronicled that part of his presentation that painted a picture of two worlds in one — one obese, one anemic.

Guess which one I’m…..hold on, M&Ms time…..closest to?

Check back with INVO8 later for more from Peters on what makes us a junk-food culture and how it relates to biosciences.

And I’ll try to come up with a tangible connection between it and my analysis of Arkansas geography…

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