By Elise Takahama Seattle Times staff reporter
The title of his first book tells you a lot about the work and wit of Dr. King Holmes: “How To Have Intercourse Without Getting Screwed.”
“I wrote it for my kids,” Holmes said, with a grin, at a lecture in 2013.
That was his style — and, in a nutshell, what he spent nearly his entire professional life doing. In studying sexually transmitted infections at a time when research on the topic was almost nonexistent in the U.S., Holmes became a world-renowned pioneer in demystifying the field. And he was especially fond of teaching and mentoring younger learners, an expert at gently, yet persuasively, encouraging students to dream big.
Holmes was 87 when he died Sunday in Seattle. He had long been living with kidney disease and Alzheimer’s disease, and was with his wife, family and loved ones in his last moments at Skyline Retirement Community on First Hill.
“He had this sort of indefatigable energy, and the ability to open up field after field,” said Dr. Larry Corey, former president and director of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and a longtime friend and colleague of Holmes’.
“Global health became a mantra in Seattle,” Corey said this week. “And he was really one of the giants that got that started.”
Holmes was born Sept. 1, 1937, in Minnesota, and was known to friends, family and former co-workers as a visionary researcher, deep thinker and entertaining storyteller.
He received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1959 and medical degree from Cornell in 1963. After finishing an internship in medicine at Vanderbilt, Holmes was off to Pearl Harbor, where he was based as an epidemiologist in the Navy Medical Corps.
While there, Holmes also earned a doctorate in microbiology from the University of Hawaii.
Although Holmes didn’t necessarily intend on devoting his career to STI research, his first Navy assignment was to address a gonorrhea epidemic that had become widespread among sailors stationed in the western Pacific.
“That’s where the need was,” said Dr. Hunter Handsfield, a University of Washington infectious disease professor and former mentee and longtime colleague of Holmes. “He then very quickly realized the need was everywhere. He saw the sexual revolution occurring around him.”
At the time, the field of STIs had long been ignored and underresearched in the U.S., according to infectious disease experts. Much more stigma existed around the topic, but Holmes could see these diseases were important to understand clinically.
“No one would talk about them,” said UW professor emeritus of infectious diseases and global health Sheila Lukehart, who met Holmes as a graduate student studying syphilis in 1977. “You couldn’t say ‘syphilis’ on the radio. And he worked hard to make this an academic field.”
In Hawaii, Holmes came up with the concept of prescribing a single dose of antibiotic to sailors as a preventive measure against gonorrhea after a sexual encounter, according to UW Medicine. Today, post-exposure prophylaxis against bacterial STIs with doxycycline, an approach called doxy-PEP, is endorsed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s been adopted as the single most important new innovation in bacterial STI prevention in over five decades,” said Handsfield, who also served as director of Public Health — Seattle & King County’s STD control program for more than 25 years. “It’s out there because of initial work King did in the Navy.”
After his military service, Holmes completed his medical residency at UW. In 1969, he joined the UW School of Medicine faculty and later also held an appointment in epidemiology at the university’s School of Public Health.
In the early 1980s, Holmes became immersed in the response to the growing HIV epidemic, working with other leaders in the field such as Dr. Bob Wood, who was the director of King County’s HIV/AIDS program for over two decades.
In 1985, Holmes helped establish what’s become known as the Madison Clinic at Harborview Medical Center, which still treats and cares for people living with HIV. Four years later, he founded the UW Center for AIDS & STD, another hub that continues to provide patient care, research and training today.
On top of that, Holmes also served as chief of medicine at Harborview during this time, and continued to study other STIs including chlamydia, human papillomaviruses, genital herpes and Mycoplasma genitalium.
“Work was not work for him. He was happy to be at the office seven days a week,” said his wife, Virginia Gonzales, a retired clinical social worker who also spent her career in public health. The two met in Nepal while she was working on HIV response and he was on sabbatical in 1989.
Another high point in his career came with the creation of UW’s Department of Global Health in 2006, a partnership between the school’s medicine and public health departments that hadn’t been done before. Holmes was named the department’s first chair.