Recent philosophical efforts to define genes have sought to capture these practices. C. Kenneth Waters (1994) recognizes that specific research contexts determine whether genes are considered to include introns as well as exons, or regulatory or promoter regions as well as open reading frames (ORFs), but argues that what remains “fundamental” across these contexts is the concept of a gene as a stretch of DNA the linear sequence of which provides a template for a gene product, whether mRNA transc