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Ozzy Osbourne's Genome Reveals Some Neanderthal Lineage
ByOhTek writes "CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed. The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage. What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, 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... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."
Ozzy's DNA: GACCTAACGATGCTAGC...
Lemmy's DNA: GODGODGODGOD...
Trolling is a art,
Ozzy, this isn't hard to figure out. You're alive because you're rich. You can afford a comfortable lifestyle as well as medical treatment when you need it.
Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.
In 2010 that suggested that somewhere around 1-4% of everyone's DNA is Neanderthal ish?
So in Ozzy-logic, you're better at surviving because you have Neanderthal DNA? The Neanderthals would likely disagree.... if they could ;)
He's basically saying that he's been able to live as long as he has because his ancestors were members of a species that failed the natural selection test. Hilarious.
Must have been a slow news day (until the Yemeni package scare). But maybe Ozzie's onto something; perhaps Neanderthals do have greater drug survivability...
Is the gene variant they've found in him that has never been found in any other vertebrate.
Ok, maybe not more important, be definately more interesting.
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'I was curious, 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... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why,' he wrote."
So, like, were the Neanderthals permanently wasted, or what? Given that Ozzie Osbourne diet, I'm surprised that we found any fossiiled remains of the Neanderthalers.
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Ozzy, this isn't hard to figure out. You're alive because you're rich. You can afford a comfortable lifestyle as well as medical treatment when you need it.
Now, please stop fighting with Iommi and make another Black Sabbath album already.
Ozzy never did say that. The man can hardly speak! Sure, he's alive but his brain has been seriously fried.
The "Neanderthal" stuff is just another cheap attempt to get publicity. Most Caucasians have those genes.
What does Ozzie have to say about it?
I dunno, but I thought we were talking about Ozzy?
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If this is true isn't this more important the Idle Slashdot or am I missing something. If he really does have Neanderthal DNA then that suggests that at one point there was a Hybrid and that hurts and helps different theories about Human Evolution like the Out of Africa theory is hurt but the Multiregional model is helped.
Does this mean that "that" is how neanderthals sounded when they talked?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Five years ago this really would have been a surprise. Maybe even more recently than that. Shit, I'll just admit it: to me, it's a surprise, today, right now. Last I heard, the DNA evidence was that nobody alive has Neanderthal lineage -- that they were an offshoot of homo sapiens ancestors rather than being homo sapiens ancestors. Just goes to show that if you're even just a few years out-of-date on anthropology, you can miss some big things. Real news is happening, right now.
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i always sensed Ozzy was a little primitive, in a sort of caveman kind of way.
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"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I don't doubt either the quantity or quality of drugs and alcohol ingested by Mr. Osbourne, however I don't see anything particularly remarkable in having "survived." Most drug and alcohol related deaths are typically either overdoses, or injuries incurred as an effect of intoxication rather than the toxicity of the substances themselves. Of all the drugs mentioned, only alcohol has been shown to reliably cause cumulative organ and tissue damage, although even then, I'm sure there are alcoholics the world over either meeting or exceeding Mr. Osbourne's levels of consumption (especially considering he's been clean for what, nearly a decade?).
Of course, merely being alive isn't the gold standard for measuring health, and from that perspective, I don't think it indicates anything particularly super-human about either him or his genetics. Further, we have no idea what his liver actually looks like, for example, or how much longer he'll live compared to the average life expectancy for wealthy white males.
I think the best thing about having his DNA sequenced is that adds to the repository, which is what will help DNA research progress. Right now it seems to be looking at people with certain characteristics, and then trying to match them to a given gene. With a large volume of sequenced individuals, we could instead look for certain anomalies or irregularities in the data, and then see what characteristics those people have in common. I think it would provide a greater level of objectivity, by reducing false positives (which are either self-reported or observed) for a given trait. Instead of saying "these people are overweight, let's see what gene they have in common," you could say, "these people all have this gene in common, oh look, they're all overweight except for the set who train like Olympians who we never would have thought to test."
I think targeting celebrities is a good start, but only because they're egotistical enough to believe that their DNA somehow makes them special, and hence willing to pay for the research.
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apparently it's backwards with him:
the neanderthal genome reveals some lineage inherited from keith richards
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...it was food after all.
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They're homos too, right, so don't we come from them?
it's under construction
I thought this just had to be an Onion article...
I find it quite interesting. Come to think of it I think that occasionally putting interesting articles in idle is a trap so that people have to read idle just in case there are glimpses of sanity or interesting stuff, otherwise it'd just be ignored completely by most.
'I was curious, 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... there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive.
Give me a f**king break! You're alive because you're a well-nourished 62 y/o man who has not (yet) contracted a fatal disease and has avoided fatal traumatic injury in spite of frequent intoxication. Most men in the UK and the US are still alive at 62 yrs.
CNN reports that in July, rocker Ozzy Osbourne became one of few to submit his blood to have his full genome sequenced and analyzed.
That really is great. It's so nice to see a popular icon getting involved in some way with science. Just getting his name along side genetic research goes a long way to popularize science -- after all, we know how much children and teens look up to him.
The results are in, and it turns out his genome reveals some Neanderthal lineage.
Oh Ozzy, we still love you! Ha, ha!
What does Ozzie have to say about it? 'I was curious, given the swimming pools of booze I've guzzled over the years
Um, Mr. Osbourne, look--the kids--
not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine
--oh, God--
sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol
//turns pale, covers child's ears//
there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.
B-be sure to let us know... //clears throat//
I've wondered if I have any neanderthal lineage. Not because of my behavior but because I have a heavy west Irish genetic background. It would have been a corner into which the neanderthals would have retreated as they were beaten out of the rest of Europe. Google and you'll see that red hair -- a hallmark of Irish lineage -- has been postulated to be a genetic legacy of the neanderthals.
The studies showed that Europeans, whose ancestors lived alongside Neanderthals for tens of thousands of years, have a few percentage of Neanderthalish DNA that Africans don't have, and later some of them took off for Asia where they may have also mixed with other human species. Africans have the most genetic variation among Homo sapiens genes, because only some of them moved up to Europe, and only some of the people in Europe headed to Asia, but the people who stayed in Africa didn't get the Neanderthal bits.
Bill Stewart
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If populations stay isolated long enough, they can diverge enough to no longer successfully interbreed, but populations don't always work that way, especially when there aren't major geographical forces separating them, and species boundaries aren't always that sharp. Maybe we were as separate as horses and donkeys, maybe we were only as separate as wolves and dogs, or even only as poodles and Labradors.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Given that the Neanderthals are (un-?) dead, he might now have a case for being the real Lich King...
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Man, he was born in Birmingham. Don't tell me that it comes as any surprise to anybody in the UK that he has neanderthal genes.
Wonder what it costs to find those parts of the genome? Sounds expensive. There are some ways to find out if this is you (or me) that don't involve drinking "a swimming pool of booze". A couple of the schools my son attended had a dress code that allowed hem lines to extend up to the finger tips. If either one of us tried to use this standard, we'd be arrested for indecent exposure! Short limbs and long torsoe are cold weather adaptations that Neanderthals were good at. The wife is more Cromagnon in this regard. We are the same height but she can grab things on that top shelf I can barely touch. I'm still soaking up the rays (and keeping up with the Vitamin D) while others are bundled up in layers. While others are looking for seconds on desert, I'm looking for another piece of meat. To paraphrase Mark Twain, the pronouncements of Neanderthal extinction may have been premature.
The real question is how they understood enough of his speech to take that quote down.