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Marsh: ... ... want them to hear it ... ... know.
Ingerson: ... ... more important that we don't get buried.
Marsh: We're fine for now. Carry on.
Ingerson: Well we'd been carrying on with different variants of the same experiment, but we'd really hit a brick wall as far as the setup was concerned. The cells weren't lasting long enough to carry the signals we were putting in, and even if they were it wouldn't have been fast enough to be able to compete with current generation hardware. It was looking more and more like a complete failure. Martin was sure that things could be turned around, but after spending so many fruitless nights trying to come up with any kind of solution I was just about ready to throw in the towel. In fact on a couple of occasions I did, or at least told Martin I wasn't interested any more.
Marsh: So why did you go back to the experiment?
Ingerson: He was so sure. I've never really seen anyone so completely convinced they were right. It almost seemed as though he was more and more motivated as the results went downhill. It was confusing but at the same time inspiring. I didn't really know what to think to be honest, but the projects and work together didn't leave me much time to think. He probably could've said anything in a commanding enough voice and I would've done it, you know? I was mentally exhausted.
Marsh: It sounds like a difficult situation.
Ingerson: It was and it wasn't. I was pretty conscious of the mental state I was in, and didn't really mind carrying on. I wanted to be a part of something excellent, I was just sad that this thing wasn't turning out that way. Well, until things started changing. That's when I really got back on board.
Martin and I had been working for the best part of a month on a side-line project that we thought might give us a bit of a hint as to why our main experiments weren't working so well. We had cultured some of the neurons we were using in the circuit with some viral plasmids. Plasmids are like little circles of genetic code that let us change the way something biological works genetically. We were using plasmids that would drop extra genes into the cells to make them more resistant to heat. It was pretty tough because gene therapy was really far outside our remit. Martin had done some stuff for his PhD, but other than that we were going on advice from people at work and research papers. As far as we could tell, the plasmids weren't really having any effect. I was sure that it was just because we didn't really understand the theory behind it, but Martin was just as sure about our trajectory as ever. I didn't realise until later on that Martin had chosen this side project because he was trying to push our work into areas of genetic biology that I didn't understand.
Marsh: So you’re saying that his side-tracking into other dis
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