Heinlein was a mixed bag. Mostly nuts. But his meta concepts and storylines were way ahead of his time(50-70s)..and some would say even by today’s standards. Still..one of favourite early sci fi authors.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_families
[..] The Howard Families are a fictional group of people created by the author Robert A. Heinlein.
According to Heinlein, the Howard Foundation was started in the 19th century by Ira Howard, a millionaire dying of old age in his forties, for the purpose of extending human lifespan. Howard himself did not live to see the outcome; he simply endowed the experiment with his own fortune, and the trustees of the Howard Foundation used the limited scientific knowledge of the time to create a selective breeding human program to encourage, financially, people of long-lived ancestry to have children together. The Howard Foundation is greatly enriched during the Great Depression by knowledge gained through time travel so that they get out of the stock market before the crash and invest in gold rather than cash and are able to reinvest in stocks that rebound after the crash.[1]
The novel Methuselah's Children is focused on the Howard Families and their quest for acceptance on Earth and other planets. [..]