Jack Templeton, the newly appointed chairman of the John Templeton Foundation, has been many things—an athlete, a student, a surgeon, an investor, a philanthropist, and, as he says himself, a searcher—over his six-plus decades of life. But the essence of the man, say many who know him well, is to be found in his beloved profession of medicine.
“I’ll always see him as a doctor,” says his daughter, Jennifer Templeton Simpson, a social worker in West Philadelphia. “And though he no longer practices, his being a doctor influences everything—in the way he views things, the way he handles problems, the way he asks a lot of questions before he says anything. He’s basically an investigative person—one who never gives up when he doesn’t have the answer. He says that’s because when you’re dealing with a patient, you can’t give up. You just have to keep looking, even when you can’t figure something out immediately.”
This perspective translates into “a systematic approach,” in his work for the Foundation, says British physicist and long-time trustee, Russell Stannard, who admires Dr. Templeton’s application of the scientific method to the many subtle and complex issues dealt with by the Foundation—including seemingly softer areas like forgiveness. And since the Foundation funds a wide spectrum of activities in which it seeks to bring rigorous science to bear on the exploration of humanity’s basic spiritual and religious pursuits, Dr. Templeton’s profession offers the ideal framework: science partnered with compassion.
After graduating from Yale in 1962, he entered Harvard Medical School, which he found demanding in an exciting new way. Fields like histology, cardiovascular physiology, and neuro-anatomy were unfamiliar to him initially, and difficult, but anatomy in particular commanded his attention. He had been considering a career in surgery since having spent the summer of 1960 working at a Presbyterian medical mission in Cameroun. “I find a definite fascination and personal contact with medicine,” he wrote his parents from West Africa. “There exists in medicine the chance for intimacy with people.” Yet, surgical operations were, almost by definition, impersonal. “The most important things in the world become those funny little white threads called nerves or those elastic dark tubes known as arteries. You pray to God for the deftness of hand and quickness of decision that may make it possible to put this miraculous organism back together again.”
In medical school and, in particular, surgical rotations later at the Medical College of Virginia, he came to admire and appreciate the methods that physicians had developed to organize and record intricate details about a patient. The pre-operative note, for example, written by the operating surgeon the day before surgery, is a crucial method of communication among different professionals. Composed of a brief statement of the patient’s major symptoms and findings, diagnosis, and planned operative procedure, the note is a conceptually simple tool that requires deep knowledge and systematic thinking to implement successfully. This respect for detail—and the interest in sharing knowledge—has stayed with him ever since, according to colleagues.
“He has a rigorous brain,” says John Schott, M.D., a medical school classmate who is now a trustee of the Foundation. “He loves 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.” In his Foundation work, Dr. Templeton has steered analysis and funding towards the Big Questions: What are the laws of nature? Is there purpose in the emergence of increasing biological complexity? Can science make new discoveries about human spirituality? What is the genesis of generosity, its manifestations, and its impacts on the giver and recipient?
Yet his emphasis on rigor is tempered with an appreciation for flexibility, another principle learned from surgery: Stay flexible and adapt to new conditions. “We worked at Children’s Hospital together, so we saw things, many things, that were very difficult to handle,” says his wife, Pina Templeton, M.D., a pediatric anesthesiologist. Indeed, while working with Dr. Everett Koop in 1974, he embarked on a sub-specialty of evaluating and managing patients with conjoined twinning—a condition that will always be difficult medically but that was especially challenging in the days before MRIs and CT scans, says Pina Templeton. “Every aspect was complex,” she notes. “It can be very problematical to anesthetize conjoined twins, because you have to respect both of them, each as a separate individual patient. Jack had so many difficult cases that the hospital had a dictum: when a very hard case was admitted, that’s a Jack patient, we would say.”
Dr. Templeton continued to assist successfully in complex cases of conjoined twins. One set of twins Dr. Templeton has cared for has kept in touch with him over the years. “The twins have faced many crises,” says Dr. Pina Templeton. “They’ve stayed close to Jack, and call at important times, and also just to share the events in their lives.”
“Jack never lost his compassion, never objectified the patient,” recalls Dr. Schott. “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 now make him the best possible head of a foundation that is also seeking and, to use Jack’s word, searching.”