Dr. John M. "Jack" Templeton Jr., president and chairman of the John Templeton Foundation founded by his father, has died at age 75.
Templeton's family said he died on Saturday of cancer. They withheld the announcement of his death until after a ceremony for the Templeton Prize was held in London on Monday,
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Templeton was born on February 19, 1940, in New York City, to John Marks Templeton and Judith Dudley Folk. His mother was an advertising executive.
Templeton was raised in Englewood, New Jersey, and spent summers in Winchester, Tennessee, where his father was born.
He was a renowned pediatric surgeon and director of the trauma program at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he always was assigned the hardest cases. He retired in 1995 to focus on the work of his father's foundation.
Philanthropist and investor Sir John Templeton started the Templeton Fund in 1954 and his foundation in 1987, the same year he was knighted. He sold the Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group in 1992. He died in 2008.
John Templeton Jr. took over as chairman after his father's death and grew its endowment from $28 million to $3.34 billion. The foundation awarded 188 grants in 2014, mostly to universities and scholars throughout the world.
The annual Templeton prize is worth more than $1 million. This year's prize went to L'Arche founder Jean Vanier. L'Arche is a network of 147 communities in 35 countries where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers.
The younger Templeton added a publishing division, Templeton Press, in 1997, and 216 books have been released.
Both father and son were evangelical Christians and sought to fund work that showed the truth of faith in a scientific world. Templeton donated to conservative and Republican causes and campaigns,
Religion News Service noted. He also was part of Mitt Romney’s "National Faith and Values Steering Committee."
His mother was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1951. It was her death that Templeton credited for causing him to push for improving traumatic injury treatment as a doctor.
He graduated Yale University in 1962 with a history degree, and became interested in medicine during a summer internship at a medical mission in 1960. He graduated Harvard Medical School in 1968.
He met his wife, Josephine "Pina" Gargiulo, during his residency at Medical College of Virginia, where she was in training to become a pediatric anesthesiologist. They married in 1970, and she often served as the anesthesiologist to his surgeries.
Templeton is survived by his wife and two daughters, six grandchildren and one brother. His sister died in 2004.
Donations can be made to the American Trauma Society, Pa. Division, 2 Flowers Dr., Mechanicsburg, PA 17050.
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