Ozzy Osbourne To Be Genetically Decoded

Dashiva Dan writes "DNA research lab Knome has announced that it is going to sequence Ozzy's entire genome. Ozzy, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, reality television star, and spokesman for World of Warcraft among many other things, has been selected so they can discover, among other things, how drugs are absorbed in the body. The amount of abuse Ozzy has put himself through and survived is a large part of why he was chosen."

Comments

The secret to his DNA revealed

[Anonymous Coward]

Eating the heads off Bats. It gives him superpowers .... Shwing!

Re:The secret to his DNA revealed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it has. He has been dead twice, and come back twice. That's more than Jesus.

Survived?

[JorDan Clock]

I think this all really hinges on your definition of "survived."

Re:Survived?

[blair1q]

In this case it's, "made more money letting a few cameras wander around his family's life than in decades of laborious rock and roll."

Re:Survived?

[interkin3tic]

He's more coherent than a lot of younger meth or crack users out there.

Re:Survived?

[sg_oneill]

I think this all really hinges on your definition of "survived."

"Somehow isn't dead after snorting the entire cocaine output of a small south american nation."

Re:Survived?

[BluBrick]

It's too late for Keith - he's already dead.
He actually died in 1992, but no-one had the heart to tell him.

Re:Survived?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason is the drug war. In the olden days, Illegal drugs were made by professional chemists in white coats who had pride in the quality of their product.
It also had the backing of big money from that are better unnamed sources and pure intermediate chemicals to work with.
Today, It's made using the simplest and usually worst methods, using filthy chemicals by thugs.

Re:Survived?

[DesScorp]

The reason is the drug war. In the olden days, Illegal drugs were made by professional chemists in white coats who had pride in the quality of their product.
It also had the backing of big money from that are better unnamed sources and pure intermediate chemicals to work with.
Today, It's made using the simplest and usually worst methods, using filthy chemicals by thugs.

You have a very idealized version of drug use's "Good Ole' Days". There really weren't any. To begin with, the first Federal prohibition against drugs didn't come until 1914, when the Harrison Act was passed. And many of the drugs on the prohibited list aren't very common on the streets today.

Do you know when America had its biggest addiction problem, by far? If you said "the sixties" or "today", you'd be flat wrong. The high water mark for addiction in this country was between the Civil War and right before WWI. Between 2 and 5 percent of the population was addicted to drugs. And I mean really addicted. Do you know who helped cause this? Dirty street pushers? Columbian gangs? No.

Doctors.

That's right, our biggest addiction rates came from the men in "clean white coats".... but it was all legal. After morphine became widely available, doctors so overused opiates for even minor patient problems that addiction became common. You could literally go the hospital with a middling ailment and come home addicted to morphine.

  Do you know what the most common profile of the American drug addict was prior to WWI? The white, middle class housewife. The closest thing to a "drug pusher" was the snake oil salesman that offered a bottle of liquid for whatever ailed you. And that bottle was often up to 50 percent morphine-based, and was often cut with dangerous chemicals. So much for pride in quality of the product.

There are legitimate criticisms of the drug war, many of them. But don't pretend that before the "drug war" that we didn't have a huge problem. The biggest aid in bringing down both the addiction rate, and cleaning up the quality of drugs? A government law. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which prohibited the consumption of opiates without a prescription.

Do they have any of his old DNA

[blair1q]

Do they have any of Ozzy's old DNA?

i'd love to see a before-and-after diff...

Re:Do they have any of his old DNA

[Kaeso]

The report didn't have anything else on it, so I'm guessing they didn't test for heavy metals or anything of that sort. If they had, I wouldn't have been all that surprised to see mercury and lead in the list.

As for Ozzy, he at least ought to test positive for heavy metal...

Wow. Like that's costing them $10K retail.

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations to Knome on a PR scheme that's getting them mainstream advertising for almost no money. I haven't seen this much bogosity from actual scientists since they shot John Glenn into space to "learn about the effects on space on old people".

I'm sure they'll find the drug abuse resistance gene in no time. (Which seems like a really priority scientific endeavor.)

Will their next genetic decoding involve LiLo? TMZ wants to know.

Better idea

[lyinhart]

Should've chosen Keith Richards. Man's practically indestructible. If we could reverse engineer him, we'd have a genetically perfect superarmy.

Chuck Norris?

[AffidavitDonda]

What about Chucks genome? he is indestructible and, after all, he invented genetics, didn't he? But maybe his genome would be too complicated for research...

you dunnnowhattyertalkin

[circletimessquare]

bouymen didi surviveorSURVIVEDidunno WHAT yourtryinto saybout me MAN survival im striving surviving man i dunnowhatyer talking someone wheres my drin i said ineed mydrinkwhered didiput the keyys

SHARRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNN

Concentrations

[Dachannien]

I don't think Ozzy absorbs drugs anymore. After all, osmosis only works for moving stuff from high to low concentrations.

the problem with chuck norris's genes

[circletimessquare]

is that they would take the electrophoresis gel, slurp it down like jello, then spit it out as diamond bullets at the researchers. then it would take the southern blot, kick it so hard it would turn into a northern, western and eastern blot and actually blot out the word "southern" from all maps ever printed

finally, his genes, when put in the polymerase chain reaction, would replicate uncontrollably, each new sequence of chuck norris genes gaining umpteenth levels of mystical levels of martial arts power, until the polymerase chain reaction would actually set off a runaway nuclear chain reaction. the upside of this nuclear chain reaction is that it would create elements never before seen by man, and when overhearing some of the physicists from down the hall the biochemists hurriedly call into their lab that these new elements are supposed to be unstable, chuck norris's genes would be so insulted they would spontaneously stabilize every single radioactive element in the known universe, then spontaneously rewrite the fundamental laws of nature so that radioactivity itself ceased to exist