"Chill out?" Really Neil?

What happens when one TV's preeminent scientists angers the religious right and organic lefties all in the same year? Leave it to Neil deGrasse Tyson to provide just such an experiment.

Content on the astrophysicist’s science series explaining evidence proving evolution and his outspoken views on global warming have not sat well with the likes of Fox News and Creationists. Now a video of Tyson defending GMOs has passed 230,000 views on YouTube after MotherJones wrote about it Wednesday quoting Tyson stating "There are no wild, seedless watermelons. There's no wild cows...You list all the fruit, and all the vegetables, and ask yourself, is there a wild counterpart to this? If there is, it's not as large, it's not as sweet, it's not as juicy, and it has way more seeds in it. We have systematically genetically modified all the foods, the vegetables and animals that we have eaten ever since we cultivated them.”

He also observes that opposition to GMOs “smacks of the fear factor that exits at every new emerging science where people don’t fully understand it.”

The question now is whether Tyson get an “enemy of my enemies” pass or if is soon to be labeled a Big Ag stooge. As one commenter on a San Francisco Chronicle blog puts it: “Guess who just got paid a large slice of Monsanto cash?”