On Oct. 25, 2010, The “Godfather of heavy metal,” “the Prince of Darkness,” the man who made himself famous by biting the heads off small animals–Ozzy Osbourne–has had his genome sequenced.

The former frontman for Black Sabbath and reality show star recently became one of only a few hundred people in the world who have had their entire genetic code deciphered and analyzed. Osbourne, 61, wrote about his experience in a column in The Times of London on Sunday.

He says he was initially skeptical of the idea–“The only Gene I know anything about is the one in Kiss”–but quickly came around when the originator of the project, identified only as Chris, convinced him the results could help explain how he survived 40 years of intense drug and alcohol abuse and all the ill-advised antics that go along with it.

Osbourne’s blood sample was collected in early July and sent to Cofactor Genomics, a company in St. Louis, Missouri, that sequences DNA. The DNA sequence results were then sent to Knome, a startup based in Cambridge that analyzes human genomes.

According to the analysis, Osbourne has about 300,000 novel variants, a figure similar to that of other newly sequenced genomes. (The number of novel variants discovered per genome will fall as more people are sequenced.) Analysis of his mitochondrial DNA, inherited from his mother, revealed that Osbourne shared a common ancestor with Stephen Colbert about 1,000 years ago.