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I was really hoping someone would talk about the Genie experiment. Let me break it down for you thusly:
1. A girl, born retarded, is kept chained to a potty chair for 12 years, not allowed to talk, fed through a hole in the door, rarely cleaned, and never spoken to. She is beaten for making any noise at all.
2. A concerned neighbor (finally) alerts the authorities, and the father, facing extreme charges of child abuse and negligence, commits suicide, and the mother blames it all on the now dead father.
3. "Genie," who had never actually been named, was adopted by a group of linguistic scientists and tested to see whether she could learn to speak (She couldn't even make noise).
4. In the end, she still is unable to speak (she's in her late 20's/early 30's now), but we know now that speech cannot be learned at or beyond puberty "Critical Period Theory"
I would posit that this was valid scientific use of torture results. You can rephrase the question to exclude this, as science was not the malicious factor in this case.
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