Kenneth Charles Holmes FRS (1934 – 2 November 2021) was a British molecular biologist and a pioneer in using synchrotron X-ray radiation to study biology.
He then returned to London and studied at Birkbeck College for his PhD on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus, during which he worked with Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug and John Finch.
After a one-year postdoc research at the Boston Children's Hospital of the Harvard Medical School with Donald Caspar and Carolyn Cohen, Holmes moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, University of Cambridge in 1962, where he became a research scientist in the group of Hugh Huxley until 1968.
Holmes then moved to Heidelberg, where he established the Department of Biophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research.
From 1975 and 1976, Holmes was acting head of the EMBL outstation, the Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory at DESY, Hamburg.