This section, like the opening of Chapter 6, is very lightly paraphrased from Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the main difference: OG!Jekyll liked to write long long long paragraphs about himself). I've always liked the motivation of the original Dr. Jekyll: He's not trying to get rid of human evil, he's trying to separate it--to let both good and evil exist in their purest forms without being tainted by the other. Book!Jekyll is not terribly clear about how this is supposed to go down, mind you. Did he imagine he would physically split into two people? It's hard to say, but regardless of his original intentions, his experiments were technically a failure--they produced an evil personality but not a good one. Hyde may be (supposedly) pure evil, but the Jekyll personality is just as ambiguous as ever. A lot of adaptations portray Jekyll as, at best, naively optimistic, and at worst downright sanctimonious in his quest to rid the world of evil. The Jekyll of the Glass Scientists is not this kind of Jekyll. He's like the original Dr. Jekyll--painfully aware of his own demons and just looking for a little peace. This scene is subtitled, "Wow, so much basic set-up information about our main cast! Did the story up until now make ANY sense to people who haven't read Frankenstein/Strange Case? I'm not sure, I don't have a good frame of reference!"