Second, what's even more crazy is that roughly 98% of that DNA is actually non-coding.. just junk.
So, we are talking about encoding entirety of the logic to construct a human body in just around 16MB of data!!!
That's some crazy levels of recursive compression.. maybe it's embedding "varying" parsing logic, mixed with data, along the chain.
The parts of the DNA with known functions encode either proteins or RNA molecules, being templates for their synthesis.
The parts with unknown functions include some amount of true junk caused by various historical accidents that have been replicated continuously until now, but they also include a lot of DNA that seems to have a role in controlling how the protein or RNA genes are expressed (i.e. turning off or on the synthesis of specific proteins or RNAs), by mechanisms not well understood yet.
I think it's a myth that non-coding DNA is junk. Say:
https://www.nature.com/articles/444130a
>'Non-coding' DNA may organize brain cell connections.
You need to count the information contained in the non-DNA part of the cell too.
Just in case it's not obvious, you can't take human DNA and put it in a cat cell, it won't work, that cell won't replicate.
For now, the DNA replication and the synthesis of RNA and proteins using the information stored in DNA are the best understood parts about how a cell grows and divides, but how other complex cellular structures, e.g. membranes or non-ribosomal peptides, are assembled and replicated is much less understood.
We need more years of research, perhaps up to a decade or two, until we will be able to know the entire amount of information describing a simple bacterial cell, and perhaps more than that for a much more complex eukaryotic cell.