As head of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Bristol David Easty was responsible for developing the UK’s first nationwide eye bank. He was born on 6 August 1933, the son of Arthur Victor Easty, an engineer, and Florence Margaret Easty née Kennedy, a nurse. His great-grandfather, Thomas Bryant, was president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and surgeon to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII. After attending Canterbury Cathedral Choir School, Easty studied medicine at Manchester University, qualifying in 1959. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps in 1960 and spent a year as a medical officer with the British Antarctic Survey. During this year, Easty studied a group of 24 volunteers and confirmed a direct correlation between dietary fat intake and serum cholesterol levels, the first time such a relationship had been demonstrated in a small group of individuals. From 1963 to 1965, he was in Johannesburg, as a lecturer in anatomy at the University of the Witwatersrand and a general surgical registrar and an ophthalmic registrar at Baragwanath Hospital. On his return from South Africa, he became a resident at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. From 1969 to 1972, he was a senior registrar in the virus clinics and corneal clinic at Moorfields as well as a lecturer in the department of clinical ophthalmology, Institute of Ophthalmology, and a recognised teacher at the University of London. In 1972, he became a consultant ophthalmologist at Bristol Eye Hospital and, in 1982, he became the first professor and head of the department of ophthalmology at the University of Bristol, posts that he held until his retirement in 1999. He was a valued clinical colleague and he especially encouraged trainee ophthalmologists to become involved in research, leading to more than 30 MDs and PhDs being successfully completed in his department. Easty also gave basic scientists excellent opportunities to pursue research projects, often in collaboration with other departments in Bristol and elsewhere. In 1986, he established a charity, the National Eye Research Centre, to support eye research initially in Bristol, but projects and studentships were also supported in many other universities over the years. He also set up an MSc in ophthalmology, targeted principally at doctors from developing countries. Easty’s research interests were wide-ranging, but he is perhaps best known for his research into herpetic eye disease and corneal transplant immunology. He had almost 200 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 20 chapters in books and he edited six books. His clinical and research contributions were recognised by the award of both the Nettleship medal for research by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists in 1999 and the Castroviejo medal by the Cornea Society in 2002. In addition, he delivered several prestigious named lectures, notably the Doyne memorial lecture at the Oxford Ophthalmological Congress, the Mooney lecture to the Irish College of Ophthalmologists and the Richardson Cross lecture, all in 1999, and the Bowman lecture to the Royal College of Ophthalmologists in 2000. One of Easty’s major legacies was the support network provided to corneal transplantation through his collaboration with the UK Transplant Service, which led to the launch of the Corneal Transplant Service (CTS) in October 1983 with support from the Iris Fund for the Prevention of Blindness. The CTS provided for the first time a truly national distribution service for corneas, similar to the services provided by the UK Transplant Service for organs. This not only increased the availability of corneas to treat patients with corneal disease but greatly reduced the wastage of tissue. The next step was to initiate an amendment to the Human Tissue Act 1961 to allow non-medics to retrieve eyes from deceased donors. A private member’s bill introduced by John Hannam MP won unanimous parliamentary support and became the Corneal Tissue Act 1986, which meant that the task of eye retrieval no longer fell solely to ophthalmologists, who were often unable to attend donors owing to other more pressing clinical priorities. The final piece of the CTS was the setting up of the Bristol Eye Bank, which for the first time in the UK used organ culture at 34°C for the storage of corneas. This method increased the storage time for corneas from four days by hypothermia (as used by the existing eye banks at East Grinstead and Moorfields) to four weeks. The first organ-cultured corneas were transplanted by Easty in March 1986. However, this was not an eye bank solely for Bristol Eye Hospital: all the corneas stored in Bristol were made available through the UK Transplant Service for surgeons and their patients wherever they were in the UK. The CTS helped transform corneal transplantation from an out-of-hours emergency procedure, dependent in most hospitals on the availability of local donors, to an elective operation that could be planned well in advance. Within two years, almost 1,000 corneas were being distributed throughout the UK by the CTS every year. The service received the support of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, the Department of Health and corneal transplant surgeons. A sister eye bank was set up at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital, which joined the CTS in 1989. By the time the two CTS eye banks were transferred to NHS Blood and Transplant in 2015, corneas had been provided for 70,000 transplant operations, a truly fitting tribute to David Easty. Easty died from prostate cancer on 11 January 2022 aged 88. He was survived by Božana (née Martinović), a microbiologist and his wife of 40 years, their daughters Marina, Valerie and Julia, and his second partner Nancy Shepherd, a family planning doctor.