Who opened the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration on December 15, 1944 and is known as the Father of Modern Eye Banking?

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The question centers on who established the organized system that would become modern eye banking by creating a dedicated facility to collect, process, and distribute donor corneas for transplantation. R. Townley Paton opened the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration on December 15, 1944, and is remembered as the Father of Modern Eye Banking because his work introduced a formal, centralized approach to tissue retrieval, handling, and distribution. This laid the groundwork for reliable corneal grafts and standard practices that evolved into today’s eye banking system, vastly improving access to sight-restoring transplants. Eduard Zirm did perform the first successful corneal transplant back in 1905, but that milestone occurred long before the eye banking framework existed; the other names are not linked to founding this modern system.