"Back home, you were working on a serum in order to foolishly counter visible mutations," he says, not bothering to hide the fact that he thought such an endeavour impractical, immature, and stupid. Still, he needs Hank to explain this as he doesn't wish to get into an argument with Charles again on the subject. "Could you do something like that, here? Rather than isolate a marker to make you look normal, could you develop something to accelerate the gene?"

He refuses to believe Shaw's ideologies. The man was mad, utterly so, and the notion that an atomic weapon could further mutation seemed both terrifying and insane, at once. Then, Erik clings to the notion that Shaw is wrong. If Shaw is wrong, then it gives him hope -- more hope than he deserves, surely.