The one thing Dr. Nathan told me to remember about all this genome stuff is that it’s still only in its very early days. Until everyone on the planet has had the test done—and the results are fed into some megacomputer, along with everyone’s medical files—it’ll be more for scientists and rich nerds than anything else. As the doc put it: “Looking at someone’s genome today is a bit like trying watch colour TV on a black-and-white set.”
Even on a black-and-white set, though, you can still see a picture—and Dr. Nathan had some pretty far-out things to tell me. The first big piece of news is that I have a famous cousin I never knew about: Stephen Colbert, the American funny guy. “You both have mitochondrial DNA passed down from your mothers in ‘Haplogroup-T,’ ” he said.
“Haplo… what?”
“Put it this way: Less than 3 per cent of people from European descent are in this group,” he said. “Colbert hasn’t had his full genome sequenced but he did have that part of his DNA tested—for a second time, actually—just a few months ago, which is how we know. In the grand scheme of things, you’re close cousins. Your mothers’ lines go back to a pair of sisters a few thousand years ago. Our best guess is that they were living in the area of the Black Sea at the time. Most randomly chosen people would have to go back about 90,000 years to find a common ancestor.”
There’s only one problem with this life-changing revelation, as far as I’m concerned: if the doc hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t know who the fuck Stephen Colbert is—I’ve never watched his TV show. From now on, though, I’m going to be his most loyal viewer. I mean, I’m always watching the stuff my wife does on telly, so I should do the same for other family members, I suppose. Having said that: why couldn’t they have found out that I’m related to Paul McCartney or John Lennon? Not that I’m short of famous cousins now—thanks to this test, I’m coming down with them. “Your DNA also tested positive for an even smaller part of Haplogroup-T, called Haplogroup-T2,” said Dr. Nathan.
Apparently this makes me a distant relation of Henry “Skip” Gates, a big deal Harvard professor and a mate of President Obama’s. (This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, ’cos the guy was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct not too long ago. That’s pretty good evidence of an Osbourne gene, I reckon.) Other members of my extended family include the original Jesse James, the last Russian Tsar (Nicholas II), and even George I of Britain. I’m sure the royals will be over the fucking moon with that piece of information.
A lot of the other stuff in my genome was more reassuring than mind-blowing. For example: I don’t have any dodgy genes that are strongly linked to cancer, Huntington’s, or Parkinson’s (which I thought I had for a long time, before my doctor realised that I suffer from a “Parkinsonian-like tremor”). So maybe I’ll get to live as long as my indestructible nan, who made it to the age of 99. They also found nothing in my genes that suggests I’m very likely to get Alzheimer’s, which is a relief, given what Sharon’s dad went through with that horrendous disease. Another thing Dr. Nathan discovered is that I’m part Neanderthal. That won’t come as much of a surprise to the missus—or various police departments around the world. But Dr. Nathan thought it was pretty interesting. “It was only a few months ago that scientists managed to sequence a Neanderthal genome from old bones found in a Croatian cave and found a link with humans,” he said. “Previously, it was thought that all modern humans came from Africa about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Now we know there was some Neanderthal-human interbreeding, which is why there’s a small part of Neanderthal in your DNA.”
All this is news for blokes everywhere, I think: if the Neanderthals could get lucky with human females, there’s hope for us all. (One thing which blew my mind is that I have less Neanderthal in me than quite a few very brainy people. The professor guy who founded Knome, George Church, has three times more caveman in him than I do.)
Speaking of dead relatives, it also turns out that I share some DNA with the people killed in Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius blew its top in AD 79 (scientists took samples from the bodies in the ash, which is how they can tell). That means I’m also probably also descended from some of the survivors. Which makes a lot of sense, I suppose. If any of the Roman Osbournes drank anywhere near as much booze as I used to, they wouldn’t have even felt the burning lava. They could have just walked it off.
DR. OZZY’S INSANE BUT TRUE STORIES—
How the “Osbourne Identity” Was Unlocked
In July 2010, a “phlebotomist”—whatever the fuck that is—took a sample of my blood and sent it to a lab in New Jersey.
DNA was taken from my white blood cells, dissolved in a salt solution, and then sent off to Cofactor Genomics in St. Louis, Missouri.
At Cofactor, my DNA was “chopped up” into 10 to 25 trillion pieces thanks to some heavy-duty shaking. After that, they spelled out all the chemical letters—in precise order—that make me the certifiable nutter I am.
For the next 16 days, Cofactor used a photocopier-sized machine—which costs more than three Ferraris, so I’m told—to “read” my genome 13 times over and put it on a hard drive.
The hard drive with “me” on it was sent to Knome, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Knome compared the 6 billion letters in my genome with every other genome on the planet—to find why the fuck I’m still alive. Then they put all the findings on a little USB stick thing and presented it to me at home.
While trying to understand what had just happened… my brain exploded.
Apart from the distant ancestor stuff—which seems more fun than useful, to be honest—Dr. Nathan told me things based on my DNA that only my wife or my personal assistant could ever have known. Trying to get him to say it in English was another matter. “There are some variants in your ‘RNASE3’ gene that suggest you’re 240 times more likely than other people to have allergies, according to research,” he told me, for example.
Now, although those kind of odds are supposed to be quite unreliable—Dr. Nathan said they shouldn’t be trusted—they happen to be spot on in my case: I’m allergic to dust mites, and I get bad sinus infections. So who knows? Maybe the Osbourne snot gene might end up helping to find a cure for hay fever. I could think of worse ways to be remembered.
But that was just the beginning of what they found in the nose department when they were poking around in my DNA. “You also have some nonsense variants in nine of your odor receptor genes,” said Dr. Nathan.
“Eh?”
“Basically it means you might not be able to smell a few things—which isn’t all that unusual, because modern humans don’t have to sniff-out their dinner from two miles away, then go and club it to death. As the species has evolved, our sense of smell has become less sensitive.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing: my old man used to claim that he didn’t have any sense of smell—or very little. We always thought he was taking the mickey. Me and my brother used to take it in turns to fart silently next to him, to try and catch him out. But he never fell for it—so maybe he was telling the truth, after all. Maybe it was all in his genes.
Another thing they found is that my body ain’t any good at metabolising coffee. (“You’re a slow acetylator of caffeine,” is how Dr. Nathan put it—according to Tony’s scribbled notes—“because of the way your NAT2 gene works.”) That explains a lot: I like the occasional blast of espresso, but all it takes is one shot, and my eyeballs feel like they’re gonna explode and I start shaking enough to register on the Richter scale.
Now I know why.
Bearing in mind what Dr. Nathan said about those odds figures being a bit dodgy, here are some of the other interesting things he told me: I’m 6.13 times more likely than the average person to have alcohol dependency or alcohol cravings (er… yeah); 1.31 times more likely to have a cocaine addiction; and 2.6 times more likely to have hallucinations while taking cannabis (makes sense, although I was usually loaded on so many different things at the same time, it was hard to know what was doing what)
. Meanwhile, I scored low on the genes associated with heroin addiction (I was never addicted to street heroin, ’cos it made me throw up—a terrible waste of booze—but I did get very addicted to morphine for a long time). I also scored low for nicotine addiction, which is interesting, ’cos cigarettes were the first thing I gave up when I got sober.
To be completely honest with you, some of the stuff Dr. Nathan told me seemed a bit on the bleedin’ obvious side. I mean, if I’d have been the bloke who forked out $3 billion for the first test, I’m not sure I would have been too impressed when the doc told me, “Well, Mr Osbourne, Your PTPN11 gene is normal-ish—so you don’t have Noonan Syndrome.”
“What’s Noonan Syndrome?” I asked.
“A type of dwarfism.”
“So I’m not a dwarf?”
“No.”
“Oh. That’s a relief then.”
And like I said before, there are lot of things they just don’t know yet. For example: Dr. Nathan says I have 300,000 completely new “spellings” in my DNA—“Of course I do, I’m fucking dyslexic!” I told him—but they don’t really know what that means. “One of those never-seen-before things we found in your genome was a regulatory segment in your ADH4 gene, which metabolises alcohol,” said Dr. Nathan. “It could make you more able to break down alcohol than the average person. Or less able.” Given that I used to drink four bottles of cognac a day, I’m not sure anyone needs a Harvard scientist to get to the bottom of that particular mystery.
“We also found new disruptions in your TTN and CLTCL1 genes,” the doc went on. “The first one might be associated with anything from deafness to Parkinsonianism, while we know that the second one can affect brain chemistry. If you wanted to find out more about your addictive behaviour, that might not be a bad place to start.”
If anything tells you how far all this stuff has to come, that pretty much sums it up for me: I mean, if there’s a gene for addictive behaviour, you’d have thought that mine would be written in pink neon with a ribbon and a bow on top.
Of all the parts of my genome that make up who I am—from my Pompei ancestors to my snotty nose and the fact I’m ready to blast through the ceiling after one cup of coffee—it was the last thing Dr. Nathan told me that really stuck in my mind. “You have two versions of a gene known as COMT,” he said. “The first is often called the ‘warrior variant,’ and the second is known as the ‘worrier variant.’ A lot of people have one or the other—not both.” I suppose that makes me both a warrior and a worrier.
It reminded me of a time, years and years ago, when I was on holiday in Hawaii with this chick I knew. We were walking along a cliff-edge one day, and when I told her I was afraid of heights, she couldn’t believe it.
“I’m being serious,” I remember saying. “I’d get vertigo wearing your high heels.”
She just burst out laughing. I couldn’t work out what was so funny. Eventually, she said, “You don’t remember last night, do you? We were walking along this very same cliff and you ripped off your shirt and took a running jump. I don’t think you even looked to see if there were any rocks below. Luckily, you hit water. Then you wanted me to jump after you.”
Not being insane, she refused.
I always thought it was just the booze and drugs that made me do crazy things like that, even though I’ve always been a terrible hypochondriac, and in some ways quite an anxious and insecure person. But now I’m thinking it’s got more to do with my genes. Being a warrior—the crazy, Alamo-pissing, bat-eating Prince of Darkness—has made me famous. Being a worrier has kept me alive when some of my dearest friends never made it beyond their mid-twenties.
Before Dr. Nathan left, I told him my theory. He frowned, nodded a bit, squinted his eyes. Then he said, “Look, Mr. Osbourne, after studying your history, taking your blood, extracting your genes from the white cells, making them readable, sequencing them, analysing and interpreting the data using some of the most advanced technology available in the world today—and of course comparing your DNA against all the current research in the U.S. National Library of Medicine, not to mention the eighteenth revision of the public human reference genome—I think I can say with a good deal of confidence why you’re still alive.”
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Go on, then,” I said. “Spit it out.”
“Sharon,” he replied.
Dr. Ozzy’s Trivia Quiz: Mutant Strains
Find the answers—and tote up your score— here
1. Which of these creatures might have existed in real life years ago—thanks to a far-out genetic mutation?
a) Hobbits
b) Unicorns
c) Dragons
2. What was genetically special about Lakshmi Tatama when she was born in Bihar, India, in 2005?
a) She had four arms and four legs
b) She had a conjoined headless twin
c) She had three heads
3. What do scientsts put in genetically altered salmon to help keep them alive in very cold water?
a) Antifreeze
b) Polar bear DNA
c) Special “alleles” that tell the fish to grow thicker skin
4. Scientists understand genetics because of this garden vegetable:
a) Carrots
b) Brussels sprouts
c) Peas
5. The world’s first cloned sheep, Dolly, was named in honour of…
a) One of the scientists who created her
b) Dolly Parton’s tits
c) Doncaster Polytechnic
CHAPTER NOTES: BLAME IT ON THE DNA
MAJOR LIFE EVENT Biting head off winged nocturnal mammal. Pissing on the Alamo—by accident. Not being dead. Drinking four bottles of cognac a day during most of the 1980s. Being off my fucking rocker most of the time.
GENETIC CAUSE “COMT”: Both variants (“Val158” and “Met158”) A number of genes on Chromosome 10 “Haplogroup-T2” “ADH4” “NAT2”
WHAT IT MEANS I’m a warrior AND a worrier—ie, I act like a lunatic but go to the doc’s afterwards. Finally, it’s official: I’m part-Neanderthal. Some of my distant relatives survived Pompeii in AD 79 (probably). According to the doc, I have “an unusual variant near one of my alcohol dehydrogenase genes.” My body can’t process caffeine.
NOTE TO SELF Did someone just call me a COMT? Next time, say, “Sorry Officer, it wasn’t me, it was my caveman gene.” Survive Mount Vesuvius, and you can survive anything… even a bollocking from Sharon. Translation: I’m a natural born pisshead. Drink more coffee.
Friends & Arseholes
8
For People Who Aren’t People People
Only two things in life are supposed to be inevitable: death and taxes. Unfortunately that ain’t true, ’cos there’s something else you’ll never be able to avoid unless you live in Antarctica, Siberia, or Northumberland: people. They’re everywhere. At work. In shops. On your Facebollocks computer thing. And that’s a massive problem if you ain’t a people person, ’cos you’ll end up spending half your life getting into arguments, feeling embarrassed, not knowing what to say, having the piss taken out of you, or, even worse than all that, just being a boring fucker at parties. Luckily, Dr. Ozzy is here to help. Even if your idea of holiday is a month by yourself in a cave, all you have to do is follow the advice in this chapter, and you’ll be able to handle anything another human being can throw at you. Just don’t expect to like them.
Or for them to like you.
Dear Dr. Ozzy:
I hate “bear-hugging” other men, even close friends. How do I avoid it without offending anyone?
Rafael, Windsor
You’ve got a mouth, so say something. I know some tough-guy types who think it’s cool to say hello by getting me in a headlock and wrestling me to the ground—a “buddy slam” they call it over here in California. More like a load of macho bollocks, if you ask me. So if they try it, I tell them to fuck off. I mean, if your mates started to say hello by punching you in th
e face, you’d do something about it, right? So why not just say to them, “Look, I don’t like having my head in your armpit while you whack me on the back like Hulk Hogan, can’t we just shake hands, or wave at each other or something?”
Dear Dr. Ozzy:
I’ve suddenly developed a habit of putting my foot in my mouth in the most cringeworthy ways imaginable—like blurting out jokes about fat people in front of overweight friends. What could be causing this sudden outbreak of tactlessness? It’s not booze, because it’s happened as many times sober as it has when I’m drunk.
Fred, Basingstoke
It won’t make you feel any better, but we all drop a clanger every now and again. You can’t beat yourself up about it too much, ’cos life would be pretty boring if we all talked like politicians. And believe me, your fat joke’s nothing compared with the shit I used to say when I was drinking four bottles of cognac a day. One time, I had to call up Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys after a big night out and say I was sorry for telling him I was glad his brother had just died. That was about 20 years ago, and I’m still cringing now.
Dear Dr. Ozzy:
Trust Me, I'm Dr Ozzy Page 13