She answered that question already, in paragraph #3:
"I idolized Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, Tesla, Pasteur, and Darwin. I couldn’t believe they were all dead, and that I would never get to meet them and hear them talk."
You have a point there considering that a few of those were considered either lunatics, heretics or idiots in their own time. And I'm not convinced that we'd be able to recognize their genius even with an additional 20-30 years with them.
"I idolized Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, Tesla, Pasteur, and Darwin. I couldn’t believe they were all dead, and that I would never get to meet them and hear them talk."