Infectious disease specialist Dr. King Kennard Holmes, who is credited with bringing the previously ignored field of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) to the forefront of medical research, died Sunday, March 9, 2025, in Seattle after a long illness. He was 87.
Nearly single-handedly, he instigated and led the STI field into the modern scientific era.
“King K. Holmes was a visionary who saw the need and, during his nearly six decades at the University of Washington, blazed a path as the most effective proponent of this historic transition, arguably the single most productive investigator, and its most influential driver,” several of his colleagues wrote in a 2024 tribute in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
Dr. Holmes was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Global Health and Professor Emeritus of Medicine in the Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. From 2007 to 2014, he was the founding chair of Global Health, a joint department of the University of Washington School of Medicine and School of Public Health in Seattle. He was also the first holder of the William H. Foege Chair of Global Health.
“When King began his research career in the late 1960s while serving in the U.S. Navy in Hawaii, the field of sexually transmitted infections had been ignored and neglected in the United States and many other countries for nearly three decades and was in serious disrepair, both in the academic and public health arenas,” said Dr. H. Hunter Handsfield, UW Professor Emeritus of Medicine in the Division of Allergy & Infectious Diseases at the UW School of Medicine.
King’s first major assignment for the Navy was to stem an epidemic of penicillin-resistant gonorrhea that was widespread among sailors stationed in the western Pacific.
“I had visions of working on exotic tropical diseases, such as malaria and hemorrhagic fevers,” Dr. Holmes told the journal Nature in 2006, “but this was the most common problematic infectious disease facing the Navy at the time.”
He devised and tested the concept of prescribing a single dose of antibiotic to sailors as a preventive measure against gonorrhea after a sexual encounter. Today, post-exposure prophylaxis against bacterial STIs with doxycycline, an approach called doxy-PEP, is endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
