The discovery of reverse transcriptase, made contemporaneously with Howard Temin, who had proposed the provirus hypothesis, showed that genetic information could traffic bidirectionally between DNA and RNA. They published these findings in back-to-back papers in the prestigious journal, Nature. This discovery made it easier to isolate and reproduce individual genes, and was heralded as evidence that molecular and virological approaches to understanding cancer would yield new cures for the dreaded disease. This may have influenced President Richard Nixon's War on Cancer which was launched in 1971 and substantially increased research funding for the disease. In 1972, at the age of 34, Baltimore was awarded tenure as a professor of biology at MIT, a post that he held until 1997.