Genes can vary greatly in size, but it's more accurate to say that genes consist of thousands or even millions of nucleotide bases, not hundreds.

Here's why:

* Complexity: Genes contain the instructions for building and maintaining an organism. To encode this complex information, they need a significant number of nucleotides.

* Size Variation: The smallest known human gene is only around 100 base pairs long. However, the largest gene, the dystrophin gene, is over 2.4 million base pairs long.

* Exons and Introns: Genes are often composed of both coding (exons) and non-coding (introns) regions. Introns can make up a large portion of a gene's total length.

So, while some genes might be a few hundred bases long, the vast majority of genes are much larger.