If he's experimenting on humans, and depending on how much of their minds are retained from however he's transforming people; it could be that some of them recall bits of their previous religions and have bastardized them together with The Professor being the central antagonistic deity responsible for all their woes, and the gibbering horror as a living martyr for giving up of its sanity in order to banish the professor from the lab.
The lab could even be seen as a sort of corrupted garden of eden.
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