Should Alley provide overnight monitoring to the rats in his study? The answer is both yes and no.

If the purpose of the experiment is to study the toxic characteristics of the drug and to examine its effects on physiological functions of the rat, then closely monitoring the animals, even at night, is necessary. If the rats required some postoperative medical treatment during the night, such as analgesic administration, then overnight monitoring is necessary.

Otherwise, if the use of the drug is a routine procedure following thoracotomy and the drug causes no toxic effect to the rats, as the literature suggests, then there will be no need for overnight observation of the rats.

In this case, as stated in the first paragraph, Alley has developed a new regimen and requests an animal study to prove his proposal that the drug's toxicity can be dramatically reduced by this regimen. Because no one has ever tested this proposal and it is always possible to discover valuable findings, I would suggest that Alley have someone observe the animals closely and try not to disturb them while entering the animal room especially during the night. To do this he may need some special instrument, such as a video-monitoring system.

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