Sure, science waits for no one, and everyone besides the grant-writers work odd hours occasionally.
Actually, the PI would take odd hour shifts when necessary. I guess that's part of why everyone else was willing to do it without complaint once in a while. Lead by example...
Then again, he eventually left the lab and started a company doing sleep research that was later bought out by a big pharma. I guess keeping rats awake in the name of science wasn't as rewarding as doing it in the name of a $10B+ insomnia drug market. Not that I can complain, I left that field a long time ago for tech startups as well. Lead by example, again :)
But anyway - to your point that you claim that the OP's comment about 24 hour fasting vs 48-72 hour fasting not being supported by the evidence - it seems clearly supported to me, since that was one of the main points of the study! One of key data sets they relied on was lymphocyte (and other) counts in 24 vs 72 hour fasting (it's in the full paper on Cell). And a major conclusion was "the results from a phase I clinical trial indicate that 72 but not 24 hr of PF in combination with chemotherapy were associated with normal lymphocyte counts and maintenance of a normal lineage balance in WBCs"
And if you think about it clearly 12-24 hours is not enough to be considered "fasting" from a ketosis perspective, since that's pretty much in the range of what most humans do every night. Fasting from sunup to sundown and pigging out afterwards really isn't that much different; basically just skipping a midday meal, which many people also do.