News and Stories Archive

Iowa Lions Eye Bank encourages corneal transplant patients to write to the loved ones of those who donated the tissue used in their surgeries, to express their gratitude. Retired Attorney Karl Nelson wrote his donor that he was inspired to register as an eye, organ, and tissue donor himself, and actively support and advocate for Iowa Lions Eye Bank.

Although Doug Kahler had cancer, he was still eligible to be an eye donor, because unlike with tissue and organ donation, a cancer diagnosis does not often preclude the gift of sight.

Eye Donation Month is an annual observance raising awareness about cornea donation and transplantation, honoring the gift of sight given by selfless donors and their families, celebrating corneal transplant recipients, and educating about eye donation and encouraging individuals to register as donors.

Dave McGlaughlin says he picked his wife, Jeanna, out of a catalog. “We both worked at West Music at the same time,” Dave says. “Every year, the music education department published a catalog of all the bongos, maracas and stuff they sold to universities and schools, and they always had pictures of the staff.” Dave worked at the West Music in Waterloo at the time, while Jeanna worked at the Coralville location. He says he thought Jeanna looked cute in her picture in the catalog. “I knew she was the one,” Dave says.

Keith Algreen was 11 years old and had just started the sixth grade in the fall of 1986. He was not a big guy, “…four foot eight and weighed all of 80 pounds wet,” says his mother, Marilyn. He was making plans to invite his friend, Jodi, to dance with him at the school’s fall celebration, and planned to tell her it was because he was the shortest in the class and she was the tallest.

Some glaucoma tube shunt surgeries utilize corneal tissue recovered, evaluated, and distributed by Iowa Lions Eye Bank

Tyler McKinney was a junior and the starting point guard for Creighton University’s men’s basketball team in late 2003 when he was sidelined with an eye infection called acanthamoeba keratitis. McKinney isn’t sure how he contracted the infection in his right eye, but his best guess is that it happened when he was in Canada during a preseason basketball trip.

In 1962, Ted Hunter and Alson E. Braley created the Eye Bank Network, utilizing ham radio operators to coordinate the exchange of donor eye tissue between eye banks in the United States. The two recruited George Carsner to participate.

Retired Attorney Bob Rush's association with Iowa Lions Eye Bank stretches back to 1969, when he was a law student at the University of Iowa.

Among those featured in the 2025 Dare to Discover campaign, sponsored by the Office of the Vice President of Research, is Simran Sarin, a student in the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, whose research examines cornea transplant outcomes.