Ozzy Osbourne’s DNA Fully Mapped To Be Studied By Scientists
Heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne has had his full genome sequenced and analyzed as part of a research project.
He joins the likes of DNA co-discoverer James Watson and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates on the short roster of people to have their full genome sequenced and analyzed.
Osbourne was initially skeptical about the project, he explained in his October 24 Sunday Times of London column.
“I was curious,” he wrote in his column. “Given the swimming pools of booze I’ve guzzled over the years?not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol?you name it?there’s really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.”
Scientific American spoke with Jorge Conde, co-founder and chief executive of Cambridge, Mass.?based Knome (the company that conducted the research), and Nathan Pearson, the company’s director of research, who had sat down with Ozzy earlier to go over the results of the analysis.
“If you think about what makes Ozzy unusual, it’s that he’s a world-class musician, he has an addictive personality, he has a tremor, he’s dyslexic, he gets up very early in the morning. And many of these can be traced back to the nervous system.,” Pearson said. “We didn’t find anything that can explain to you from point A to point B why Ozzy can think up good songs or why he is so addicted to cocaine, but we found some things that would be interesting to follow up on.”
Read the full Scientific American article here.
