JOHN M Templeton Jr, one of the world’s leading philanthropists whose work benefitted The Bahamas, has died of cancer at his Pennsylvania home in the United States. The president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation passed away on Saturday. He was 75.
Dr Templeton, known as “Jack,” retired from his medical practice in 1995 to manage the foundation created in 1987 by his billionaire father, Sir John Templeton, the pioneer global investor and philanthropist who created the Templeton Fund in 1954. Sir John, a Lyford Cay resident who held dual Bahamian and British citizenship until his death in Nassau at 95 of pneumonia in 2008, sold the family of Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group in 1992 and devoted his fortune to the foundation.
During Dr Templeton’s 20 years at the helm of the Templeton Foundation its endowment grew from $28m to $3.34bn, with 188 grants awarded in 2014, primarily to major universities and scholars worldwide. A total of $966m in grants and charitable activities have been funded since the foundation’s creation in 1987. It awarded $103m in 2013, the last year for which figures are available, which ranked it 55th in total giving of US foundations, according to the Foundation Centre.
In The Bahamas, through grants administered by First Trust Bank Ltd, $380,000 has gone to the Pompey Museum while others have helped to fund a family healing initiative led by Dr David Allen and to sponsor the “Laws of Life” essay competition for students of all ages up to 25 in The Bahamas, which this year hopes to surpass the 1,000 entries from when it was last held three years ago.
The 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’s optimism about the possibility of acquiring “new spiritual information” and from his commitment to rigorous scientific research and related scholarship.
The foundation is perhaps best known for awarding the annual Templeton Prize. Its monetary value of $1.7m 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 honours a living person who has made exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension, whether through insight, discovery, or practical works.
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.
John Marks Templeton Jr was born on February 19, 1940, in New York City, the eldest of three children. 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 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 there he met Josephine Gargiulo, known as “Pina”, who was training as a paediatric anesthesiologist. They were married in 1970.
He 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. 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 paediatric surgeon, director of the trauma programme, and, later, as professor of paediatric surgery at the University of Pennsylvania.
During his time at Children’s Hospital it gained an international reputation for the evaluation and management of patients with conjoined twinning and Dr 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 as lead anesthesiologist.
After the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989, Dr Templeton and Children’s Hospital, in conjunction with the organisation HOPE International, established training programmes in emergency care and trauma management of children in a number of former Eastern Bloc countries, including Poland, Bulgaria and Romania.
Dr Templeton served on various boards, published dozens of papers in medical and professional journals in addition to two books, and was the recipient of numerous awards. He is survived by his wife, Pina, daughters Heather Dill and Jennifer Simpson and six grandchildren.
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