You are so lucky to have people like that around you.  Too bad about the other one who was the wife of the scientist.  It is a shame that people limit themselves so much in what they allow into their minds.
I am really working on and hoping that my youngest son wíll be very open as he grows up.  They seem to lose so much as they get old enough to enter the rapid pace in the work world.  I stíll try to encourage them to look beyond only the obvious answers, and I know that one day, most of them wíll.
My words wíll cóme back to them as surely as the training I got from my mom and my aunts.