Geneticist: Ozzy Osbourne genes explain his health

Well, this explains a lot: Heavy-metal icon Ozzy Osbourne is a mutant.

Specifically, the hard-rocking Osbourne, 61, has several previously unseen gene variants, said geneticist Nathaniel Pearson, which may explain how the Black Sabbath and Blizzard of Ozz singer could have ingested prodigious quantities of drugs and alcohol during the past several decades while remaining relatively healthy.

Pearson, who spoke at the Technology, Entertainment, Design, Medicine, or TEDMED, medical and health-technology conference in San Diego during the weekend, had sequenced Osbourne's genome for the Cambridge, Mass.-based company Knome Inc., as part of a project exploring genes and musicality. But what they discovered, company co-founder Jorge Conde told ABC News Wednesday, is that Osbourne "had a change on the regulatory region of the ADH4 gene, a gene associated with alcoholism, that we've never seen before."

Osbourne, writing in an Oct. 24 column in London's Sunday Times, said he agreed to the study since "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 - you name it - there's really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why."

"I've always said that at the end of the world there will be roaches, Ozzy and Keith Richards," Osbourne's wife and manager, and "America's Got Talent" judge Sharon Osbourne, quipped at the conference.

It seems oddly unsurprising that the multiplatinum Godfather of Metal, who famously bit the head off a dove in a 1981 meeting with record-company executives and off a bat at a Des Moines concert that year, was also found to have "a sliver" of Neanderthal ancestry.