New Report Reveals Ozzy Osbourne is a Genetic Mutant

Well, this might at least explain his appearance with the Merry Band of Misfits the other day. I always figured Keith Richards had some kind of super-gene that kept him going, but I guess Ozzy's got it himself.

A new study shows that legendary heavy metal rocker Ozzy Osbourne may be a genetic mutant.

The 61-year-old former lead singer of Black Sabbath has several gene variants that "we've never seen before," experts said.

Geneticist Nathaniel Pearson, who sequenced the rocker's genome, including variants that could impact how Osbourne's body absorbs methamphetamines and other drugs, ABC News reported on its website today.

Osbourne's resilience piqued the interest of Knome, Inc., a genomics company that decided to sequence the "full Ozzy genome."

"Why not Ozzy?" Jorge Conde, co-founder and chief executive of Cambridge, Mass.-based Knome, told ABC News.

The results of Knome's sequencing were released last Friday in San Diego at this year's TEDMED conference.

The biggest differences in Osbourne's genes compared to other people is how he processes drugs and booze.

Genes connected to addiction -- alcoholism and the absorption of methamphetamines -- all had unique variations in Osbourne, a few of which Knome geneticists had never seen before.

"He had a change on the regulatory region of the ADH4 gene, a gene associated with alcoholism, that we've never seen before," Conde told ABC News. "He has an increased predisposition for alcohol dependence of something like six times higher.

"He also had a slight increased risk for cocaine addiction, but he dismissed that. He said that if anyone has done as much cocaine he had, they would have been hooked."

Osbourne is also 2 1/2 times more likely to suffer from hallucinations associated with marijuana use, though he said he wouldn't know if that were true because he so rarely smoked marijuana without other drugs also in his system.