Trust Me, I'm Dr Ozzy (20 page)

“At Cofactor,” the medic went on, “they use a machine that costs almost half a million quid to read your DNA and ‘sequence’ your genes, then they’ll download the whole thing onto a hard drive and post it back to Knome. After that, researchers will go through it all with a fine-tooth comb, to see what your genes have to say about you. Start to finish, the whole thing should take about 13 weeks. Not bad, when the first one took 13 years.”

“Next year it’ll probably take 13 fucking minutes,” I said. The guy just smiled nervously. Then he cleared off. The next day I went back to my tour and put it all out of my mind.

It was three months later when I finally got a call saying they were gonna send over another bloke—Dr. Nathan—to deliver my results. Sharon couldn’t be with me for the presentation, ’cos of some badly timed meetings in Los Angeles, so she called him up beforehand to make sure he wasn’t going to tell me that my head might explode in 2013, or some other horrendous news. Strangely enough, though, I wasn’t nervous. Probably ’cos I wasn’t expecting to understand a word of what the guy had to say.

I’ve since learned that Dr. Nathan—who looks way too young to have so many letters after his name—is an expert in “primate DNA.” And I have to say, I felt pretty primitive when I was listening to him: it was like he’d swallowed Google for breakfast, then had a couple of encyclopaedias for lunch. The first thing he did was give me a silver box with Latin written on the lid (“It means ‘Know Thyself,’ ” he told me, “it’s from the Temple of Apollo”). When I opened it up, there was one of those little USB drive things inside. The doc took it out, popped it into his laptop, and the screen filled up with about ten billion numbers and letters… line after line after line after line of ’em. It would have taken me ten years to read one page. “Well, there it is,” said Dr. Nathan, proudly. “Your genome.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what the fuck does it
mean
?”

“Well, it shows you pretty much all of the 20,000 to 25,000 genes in your body,” he explained. “Better than that, it tells you
what order
they’re put together, then it cross-checks that with other people’s genomes. Now, most people’s genomes are very similar, because we’re all from the same species, right? But there are all kinds of tiny differences that let you see what kind of traits you have, or what diseases you might get.”

The craziest thing Dr. Nathan told me is that we all have the Huntington’s gene—it’s if you’re
missing
any genes that you’re in big trouble—but only people with certain types will ever come down with the disease. Another thing that blew me away is how much they already know about the genes involved in things like Huntington’s: they know so much, in fact, even if you
don’t
have the disease, your DNA can tell you straight up whether or not you’re likely to pass it on to your kids. That’s pretty heavy-duty stuff, and I can see why a lot of people might not want to know. Personally, I’m not that bothered. I’ve already had all my kids, so it’s too late to worry now. And even if my DNA told me that I was a goner, I could still get run over by a truck tomorrow—or poisoned by a radioactive duck turd—long before whatever it was they found in my genome had a chance to kill me. And we all have to die of
something
. At least if you know what’s coming, you might get a chance to put it off for a while.

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.