A faculty member (principal investigator [PI]) is preparing to submit a protocol to the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) for an experiment studying the effect of different levels of alcohol on rats’ ability to perform a variety of tasks.
This is the PI’s first time conducting an animal study (she has always used human subjects in the past). As she is busy with other projects, a graduate student in the lab will actually run the animal experiments. He has worked before on studies involving other laboratory animals, but not rats.
For convenience, the PI wants to keep the rats in her laboratory, where she conducts all her experiments with human subjects, instead of the department’s IACUC-approved animal facility.
As this is her first time using rats, the PI discusses the experiment with several colleagues to get an estimate for the range of alcohol doses. Since she is unsure of exactly how the experiment will go, she requests approval for 25% more animals than she anticipates using.
The experiment involves some tasks that could potentially cause short term pain or distress to the rats. However, the PI believes that the alcohol will lessen these effects (as it can in humans), so she does not include in her protocol any procedures to minimize pain or distress.
Another faculty member in her department has asked if he can have the animals at the end of her study to use in his own research involving similar behavioral tasks.