One of my favorite bands of all time is Black Sabbath. Their music is moody in a dark and aggressive type of way, while maintaining a certain musicality full of groove and authenticity that modern quantized music lacks. They took the blues and put a sinister twist on it, creating timeless tunes angsty teens can still relate to decades later. As the pioneers of heavy metal, it should be no surprise that the group partied as hard as they jammed. No one has a bigger reputation for getting wild than Sabbath frontman, Ozzy Osbourne. Much of his music career was defined by drug and alcohol antics, which were common for many bands at the time, but you don’t get the title “Prince of Darkness” through being a light-weight. Despite that, I view Ozzy as a role model, and am fascinated by the lifestyle he led back then. Due to this fact, I found myself consuming a lot of media related to him and his Sabbath band mates outside of music whether it be interviews, documentaries, or articles. One article in particular really stunned me. It is on the findings of a 2010 study where Ozzy’s genome was coded, not only for musical talent indicators, but propensity for such a “fast and loose” way of living while maintaining good health for a then 61 year old. Jorge Conde and his team at KNOME, the group behind the project, discovered some very interesting, and explanatory, mutations within Ozzy’s DNA. These include a difference in the ADH4 gene that makes him 6 times more susceptible to alcohol dependence, and a 2.6 increased chance to hallucinate from marijuana. KNOME also found Ozzy had a slightly increased chance for cocaine addiction, but the singer disagreed claiming “if any has done as much cocaine as he had, they would’ve been hooked”. These mutations also gave Oz a greater tolerance for these substances than most. His wife Sharon once stated, “at the end of the world there will be roaches, Ozzy, and Keith Richards. Such genetic predispositions may help explain way he did such wild things like bite the head off a live bat on stage and handle taking cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, and Rohypnol all at once, but I believe this opens a whole new door into understanding if those with the most impressive feats under their belt, in any area, are different from the average man down to the cell. Genes can help explain why the strongest men are so strong or why the brightest minds are so smart. Cultivation of such traits can lead to a renaissance of the human genome, where most are born with the capacity to change and influence the world around them, resulting in achievements never believed to be possible.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Wellness/genetic-mutations-ozzy-osbourne-party-hard/story?id=12032552