John Marks Templeton, the pioneer global investor who founded the Templeton Mutual Funds and for the past three decades devoted his fortune to his Foundation's work on the big questions of science, religion, and human purpose, passed away on 8 July 2008, at Doctors Hospital in Nassau, Bahamas, of pneumonia, it was announced on Thursday by Franklin Templeton's SA office.

Templeton started his Wall Street career in 1937 and went on to create some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds. Called by Money magazine "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century" (January 1999), he sold the Templeton Funds in 1992 to the Franklin Group for $440-million.

A naturalised British citizen who lived in Nassau, the Bahamas, Templeton was created a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for his many philanthropic accomplishments, including his endowment of the former Oxford Centre for Management Studies as a full college, Templeton College, at the University of Oxford in 1984.

In 1972, he established the world's largest annual award given to an individual, the #1 000 000 Templeton Prize, which is announced in New York and presented in London. The Prize is intended to recognize exemplary achievement in work related to life's spiritual dimension. Its monetary value always exceeds that of the Nobel Prizes ? Templeton's way of underscoring his belief that advances in the spiritual domain are no less important than those in other areas of human endeavour.

Templeton contributed a sizable amount of his fortune to the John Templeton Foundation, established in 1987 and based in West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania. The Foundation currently has an endowment of approximately $1.5-billion and gives out some $70-million in annual grants. The Foundation's mission is to serve as a philanthropic catalyst for research on what scientists and philosophers call the "Big Questions". This vision is derived from Templeton's belief that rigorous research and cutting-edge science are at the heart of human progress.

Most of the Foundation's grant-making supports scientific research at top universities, in such fields as theoretical physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social science relating to love, forgiveness, creativity, purpose, and the nature and origin of religious belief. The Foundation also encourages and supports informed, open-minded dialogue between scientists and theologians as they work on the "Big Questions" in their distinctive fields of inquiry.

"Points of maximum pessimism"

Taking a less-travelled route in investing, Templeton provided advice on how to invest worldwide when Americans rarely considered foreign investment. While standard stock-buying advice is "buy low, sell high", Templeton took the strategy to an extreme, picking nations, industries, and companies hitting rock bottom, what he called "points of maximum pessimism". When war began in Europe in 1939, he borrowed money to buy 100 shares each in 104 companies selling at one dollar per share or less, including 34 companies that were in bankruptcy. Only four turned out to be worthless, and he turned large profits on the others after holding each for an average of four years.

After beginning his career on Wall Street in 1937, Templeton bought a small investment advisory concern in 1940 that became Templeton, Dobbrow and Vance, Inc. He entered the mutual fund industry in 1954 when he established Templeton Growth Fund.

In 1956 Templeton joined with marketing consultant William Damroth to launch Nucleonics, Chemistry and Electronics Fund, a specialty fund that reflected Templeton's lifelong interest in science and technology. With investor interest in specialty funds rising in the late 1950s, Templeton Damroth's new fund grew dramatically. Hoping to raise capital to finance more growth, Templeton then made a bold move to accelerate his company's growth.

In this era, mutual fund management companies rarely became public corporations. As a result, they were denied access to the public markets to raise capital to grow. A series of court decisions during the late 1950s, however, had clarified the provisions of the Investment Company Act of 1940 and upheld the right of fund management companies to "go public". With five funds under management and total net investments of over $66-million in 1959, John Templeton seized the opportunity to raise capital, and Templeton Damroth joined a sudden surge of fund firms that went public at this time.

Templeton sold his stake in Templeton Damroth in 1962, and over the next three decades created some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds. Each $10 000 invested in the Templeton Growth Fund Class A in 1954, with dividends reinvested would have grown to $2-million by 1992 when Sir John sold the Templeton Growth Fund. This translates into an annualised return of 14.5 percent since inception.

If a business is not ethical, it will fail

Templeton was known for starting his mutual fund's annual meetings with a prayer. He explained that the devotional words were not pleas for financial gain in the mundane world, but rather meditations to calm and clear the minds of managers and stockholders. Templeton often told interviewers that "competitive business", in his view, matched in many ways the compassionate aims of religious bodies. "For one thing, it enriches the poor more than any other system humanity ever has had," he once told Insight magazine. "Competitive business has reduced costs, has increased variety, has improved quality." And if a business is not ethical, he added, "it will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually."

Although he was a Presbyterian elder active in his denomination and served on the board of the American Bible Society, Templeton espoused what he called a "humble approach" to theology. Declaring that relatively little is known about God through scripture and present-day theology, he once predicted that "scientific revelations may be a gold mine for revitalising religion in the 21st century."

John M Templeton was born on 29 November 1912, in the small town of Winchester, Tennessee. Though forced to support himself while studying at Yale University during the Depression, he graduated in 1934 near the top of his class. He was named a Rhodes Scholar to Balliol College at Oxford, from which he graduated with an MA in law. He married the former Judith Folk in 1937, and the couple had three children ? John, Anne and Christopher. She died in February 1951. He married Irene Reynolds Butler seven years later on New Year's Eve 1958. She passed away in 1993 after 35 years of marriage.

John Templeton is survived by his son John M Templeton, Jr, known as Jack, who retired as a paediatric surgeon in 1995 to become president of the John Templeton Foundation, his son Christopher, stepdaughter Wendy Brooks, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His daughter, Anne Templeton Zimmerman, died in 2005 and his stepson, Malcolm Butler, died in 1995.