According to Dreger, whether federal regulations required professors to obtain formal approval from a university IRB before interviewing people was uncertain at the time; she points out that shortly after publication of the book, the US Department of Health and Human Services, in conjunction with the Oral History Association and American Historical Association, issued a formal statement that taking oral histories, conducting interviews, collecting anecdotes, and similar activities do not constitute IRB-qualified research, and were never intended to be covered by clinical research rules, when such work is "neither systematic nor generalizable in the scientific sense."