Genes and 50 novels in Hawking’s lecture

In his 1996 lecture “Life in the Universe,” Stephen Hawking offered a rough analogy: he estimated the useful information in human genes at about 100 million bits and that in a paperback novel at about 2 million. That leads to the comparison with roughly 50 novels. It is an illustrative estimate by the lecturer, not a literal equivalence between a person and books or a precise modern measurement of genomic “information.”