The NIH Clinical Center was established in a postwar world still haunted by the Nazi medical experiments. When it opened, it was governed not only by an internal review of protocols but also by the provisions of the 1946 Nuremberg Code mandating that informed consent be obtained from human research subjects and by the ancient Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. In 1972, public reports of the Tuskegee syphilis study revealed that African American males in a study of the natural history of syphilis infection had not been given antibiotics even after they became available. This scandal led Congress to enact the 1974 Protection for Human Subjects Act which mandated Institutional Review Boards for research projects that utilized human subjects. It also created the NIH Office of Protection from Research Risks, an office which in June 2000 was renamed the Office of Human Research Protections and transferred to the Office of the Secretary, Department of Health and Human Services.