John Templeton Foundation mourns loss of Dr Jack Templeton

John M Templeton, Jr, MD, the president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation and formerly a paediatric surgeon and director of the trauma program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, died on Saturday, May 16 at his home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. He was 75 years old.

The cause was cancer, according to his daughter, Heather Templeton Dill.

Out of respect for Dr Templeton, the family withheld the formal announcement until after a ceremony for the Templeton Prize, sponsored by the foundation, which was held on May 18 at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.

Templeton, known as "Jack," retired from his medical practice in 1995 to manage the foundation created in 1987 by his father, Sir John Templeton, the pioneer global investor and philanthropist who created the Templeton Fund in 1954. The elder Templeton sold the family of Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group in 1992 and devoted his fortune to the foundation, based in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

The John Templeton Foundation serves as a philanthropic catalyst for discoveries on what scientists and philosophers call the big questions of human purpose and ultimate reality, a vision derived from Sir John Templeton's optimism about the possibility of acquiring "new spiritual information" and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship.

During Templeton's 20 years at the helm of the foundation as president and also as chairman after the death of Sir John in 2008, its endowment grew from $28 million to $3.34 billion, with 188 grants awarded in 2014 primarily to major universities and scholars worldwide. A total of $966 million in grants and charitable activities have been funded since the foundation's creation in 1987.

It awarded $103 million in 2013, the last year for which figures are available, which ranked it 55th in total giving of U.S. foundations, according to the Foundation Center. The foundation's primary funding areas include science and the big questions, character and virtue development, individual freedom and free enterprise, genetics, exceptional cognitive talent and genius, and the Templeton Prize. Recent grants have explored topics such as gratitude, beneficial purpose, exoplanets, and religious liberty. A publishing division, the Templeton Press, was added in 1997, with 216 books released to date. An online magazine, Big Questions Online, started in 2010. Nautilus, a literary science magazine with substantial support from the foundation, was launched in 2013. It won two National Magazine Awards in 2015 in its first year of eligibility, the first publication in the history of the awards to do so.

The foundation is perhaps best known for awarding the annual Templeton Prize. Its monetary value of £1.1 million (about $1.7 million or €1.5 million) makes it one of the world's largest annual awards given to an individual and is set always to exceed the Nobel Prizes. According to the foundation's website, it honors a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works. The 2015 Prize was awarded to Jean Vanier, the founder of L'Arche, an international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers.

John Marks Templeton, Jr was born on February 19, 1940 in New York City, the eldest of three children of John Marks Templeton and the former Judith Dudley Folk, an advertising executive who died in 1951. He was raised in Englewood, New Jersey, where his family lived, and spent many summers in Winchester, Tennessee, the birthplace of his father and where most of his extended family still lives.

Templeton attended Englewood public schools, the George School, a Quaker institution in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and received a BA in History from Yale University in 1962. He began considering a career in medicine during a summer internship in 1960 at a Presbyterian medical mission in Cameroon. He received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1968 and completed his internship and residency in surgery at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond in 1973.

During his time at the Medical College of Virginia he met the former Josephine Gargiulo, known as Pina, who was training as a pediatric anesthesiologist. They were married in 1970.

He subsequently trained in paediatric surgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia from 1973 to 1975 under the hospital's surgeon-in-chief, Dr C Everett Koop, who later became US Surgeon General from 1982 to 1989. After two years as a physician in the US Navy stationed in Portsmouth, Virginia, he returned to Children's Hospital in 1977 where he served as pediatric surgeon, director of the trauma program, and, later, as professor of pediatric surgery at the University of Pennsylvania. After retiring in 1995 he continued to serve as an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

During his time at Children's Hospital it gained an international reputation for the evaluation and management of patients with conjoined twinning. Throughout his career Templeton performed numerous surgeries on conjoined twins under the direction of Koop, and his successor, Dr James A O'Neill, Jr Many of those surgeries were undertaken with his wife Pina as lead anaesthesiologist.

"We saw many, many things that were very difficult to handle," she recalls on the foundation's website. "Every aspect was complex and Jack had so many difficult cases that the hospital had a dictum: when a very hard case was admitted, we would say, 'that's a Jack patient.'"

After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Templeton and Children's Hospital, in conjunction with the organization HOPE International, established training programs in emergency care and trauma management of children in a number of former Eastern Bloc countries including Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.

Templeton was board certified in paediatric surgery and surgical critical care and was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, served as Vice Chairman of the American Trauma Society and was a president of its Pennsylvania division. He served on various boards including the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, Foreign Policy Research Institute, American Trauma Society, National Bible Association, and Templeton Growth Fund, Ltd. He published dozens of papers in medical and professional journals, in addition to two books, Thrift and Generosity: The Joy of Giving (2004), and an autobiography, John M Templeton, Jr.: Physician, Philanthropist, Seeker (2008).

He was the recipient of numerous awards including the National Courage of Belief Award from the American Jewish Committee in 2010, the Heroes of Liberty Award (jointly with his wife) from the National Liberty Museum in 2006, and honorary doctorate degrees from Buena Vista University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Alvernia College. He was a member of Proclamation Presbyterian Church in Bryn Mawr since its founding in 1989.

"Jack loved medicine for many reasons, but one is that it teaches us to look for what is absolutely essential, and to separate the essential from the trivial," notes Dr John Schott, a medical school classmate and former trustee of the foundation. "Jack never lost his compassion, never objectified the patient. You have to make life and death decisions within a short period of time and often without enough information. That's why medicine is a calling, and not just a job. And Jack's seeking nature, his interest in purpose, his grappling with the big questions - all made him a superb doctor and made him the best possible head of the foundation."

"I'll always remember him as a doctor," says his daughter Jennifer Templeton Simpson. "His being a doctor influenced everything - the way he viewed things, the way he handled problems, the way he asked a lot of questions before he said anything. He never gave up when he didn't have an answer."

Templeton is survived by his wife, Pina, who retired from Children's Hospital in 1999, their daughters Heather Dill and Jennifer Simpson, sons-in-law Jeff Dill and Scott Simpson, six grandchildren, a brother, Christopher, and a brother-in-law, Gail Zimmerman. His sister, Anne Zimmerman, died in 2004.

The Templeton family asks that in lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the American Trauma Society, PA Division, 2 Flowers Drive, Mechanicsburg, PA 17050.

See also: ICN 19 May 2015 London: Jean Vanier receives 2015 Templeton Prize www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=27471

Editor's note: How gracious and brave of Dr Templeton's daughters to have gone through with Monday's ceremony, the day after their father had died. What a terrific family!