Trust Me, I’m Dr. Ozzy

3. A dentist in North Carolina, USA, was accused of using a syringe to inject this into his patients’ mouths:

a) LSD

b) His own semen

c) A home-made numbing gel made from dog’s liver

4. To advertise a new technique he’d invented, a British GP performed what surgery on himself?

a) Tendon repair

b) Kneecap replacement

c) Vasectomy

5. A survey of GPs in America found that 73 per cent of them had…

a) Been turned on by a patient

b) Made sure that a rude patient spent longer in the waiting room

c) Done things to patients that weren’t necessary, just to look better in court if they were sued

Genetics Explained… Sort Of 7

Before Reading, Apply Ice-Pack to Brain

When I got a call one morning from an editor at The Sunday Times in London telling me that some scientists wanted to “sequence my genome,” I didn’t know what to say. Not ’cos I was surprised—nothing could surprise me any more when it comes to the crazy shit that happens in my life—I just didn’t understand what the fuck he was talking about. The only “genome” I’d ever heard of was the kind you find down the bottom of the garden with a white beard and a pointy red hat.

“You what?” I said. “A gnome?”

“No, a gee-nome,” laughed the guy on the phone. “Basically all your genes and the bits in between, mapped out on a computer. The company that arranges it—and hires the scientists to analyse the results—is called Knome, Inc. It was founded by a top Harvard professor.”

To be honest with you, I didn’t like the sound of it. I’m a rock star, not Brain of Britain. And even if they did the test, how would I know what it said? The only Gene I know anything about is the one in Kiss. Still, it’s not every day someone wants to unravel your DNA—so I asked if anyone else had done the same thing. “Only about 200 people, because the technology is so expensive,” said the editor (my assistant Tony was taking notes). “The first human genome they ever sequenced was in 1990, but they didn’t get the final results until more than a decade later in 2003. It cost $3 billion.”

“Well that rules it out then,” I said. “I ain’t got $3 billion.”

“Prices have come down,” he replied. “Besides, in your case, Knome say they can raise the cash from other people. They’ll provide you with your entire genome on a USB drive the size of a Zippo lighter. Then they’ll go through the results with you in person, line by line.”

I still didn’t get it. Why spend the money on me when they could do someone like Stephen Hawking? “Look,” said the editor, “you’ve said it yourself: you’re a medical miracle. You went on a drink and drugs bender for 40 years. You broke your neck on a quad bike. You died twice in a chemically induced coma. You walked away from your tour bus without a scratch after it was hit by a plane. Your immune system was so compromised by your lifestyle, you got a positive HIV test for 24 hours, until they proved it was wrong. And yet here you are, alive and well and living in Buckinghamshire.”

“So the test can really tell me why I’m still here?” I asked.

“It won’t tell you everything—scientists still have a lot more work to do before they understand how genes work. But it might help make sense of a lot of things. It will also be able to tell if anything in your genes is linked to, say, Alzheimer’s disease. But you’re in your sixties, so anything really scary in your DNA would have probably killed you a long time ago, along with that line of ants you once snorted with Motley Crue.”

“What if they find a kind of new gene? Will I get a disease named after me?”

“Possibly.”

That was enough for me. “Okay then,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

A few weeks later, a medic came to my house in Chalfont St. Peter to take my blood. I was having a day off from my world tour at the time—and to be honest with you, I was so knackered, I began to wonder what the fuck I was doing. I mean, it’s not a great feeling, being a human petri-dish. Then again, I was curious. Given the swimming pools of booze I’ve guzzled over the years—not to mention all 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.

As soon as the guy in the white coat was done taking his sample, he put the test tube in an envelope and told me he was going to send it off to a lab in New Jersey. “First they’ll extract the DNA, then they’ll process it at a place called Cofactor Genomics in St. Louis, Missouri,” he said (again, Tony was scribbling away, ’cos I knew I’d never remember any of this later).

“At Cofactor,” the medic went on, “they use a machine that costs almost half a million quid to read your DNA and ‘sequence’ your genes, then they’ll download the whole thing onto a hard drive and post it back to Knome. After that, researchers will go through it all with a fine-tooth comb, to see what your genes have to say about you. Start to finish, the whole thing should take about 13 weeks. Not bad, when the first one took 13 years.”

“Next year it’ll probably take 13 fucking minutes,” I said. The guy just smiled nervously. Then he cleared off. The next day I went back to my tour and put it all out of my mind.

It was three months later when I finally got a call saying they were gonna send over another bloke—Dr. Nathan—to deliver my results. Sharon couldn’t be with me for the presentation, ’cos of some badly timed meetings in Los Angeles, so she called him up beforehand to make sure he wasn’t going to tell me that my head might explode in 2013, or some other horrendous news. Strangely enough, though, I wasn’t nervous. Probably ’cos I wasn’t expecting to understand a word of what the guy had to say.

I’ve since learned that Dr. Nathan—who looks way too young to have so many letters after his name—is an expert in “primate DNA.” And I have to say, I felt pretty primitive when I was listening to him: it was like he’d swallowed Google for breakfast, then had a couple of encyclopaedias for lunch. The first thing he did was give me a silver box with Latin written on the lid (“It means ‘Know Thyself,’ ” he told me, “it’s from the Temple of Apollo”). When I opened it up, there was one of those little USB drive things inside. The doc took it out, popped it into his laptop, and the screen filled up with about ten billion numbers and letters… line after line after line after line of ’em. It would have taken me ten years to read one page. “Well, there it is,” said Dr. Nathan, proudly. “Your genome.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what the fuck does it mean?”

“Well, it shows you pretty much all of the 20,000 to 25,000 genes in your body,” he explained. “Better than that, it tells you what order they’re put together, then it cross-checks that with other people’s genomes. Now, most people’s genomes are very similar, because we’re all from the same species, right? But there are all kinds of tiny differences that let you see what kind of traits you have, or what diseases you might get.”

The craziest thing Dr. Nathan told me is that we all have the Huntington’s gene—it’s if you’re