Sharbat Gula is the name of the famous Afghan girl photographed in 1984 at the age of 12. The photo of her was taken in a refugee camp in Pakistan by a National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. After 18 years, she was traced to a remote part of Afghanistan by McCurry.
When the photo was taken, McCurry didn’t have her name. McCurry computed IrisCode from both of her eyes as photographed in 1984. Then, when a photo of her was taken in 2002, he computed the eyes in that photo. When he ran the search engine, the matching algorithm on the IrisCodes, he got a Hamming Distance of 0.24 for her left eye, and 0.31 for her right eye.
As may be seen from the histogram that arises when different irises are compared by their IrisCodes, these measured Hamming Distances are so far out on the distribution tail that it is statistically almost impossible for different irises to show so little dissimilarity. The mathematical odds against such an event are 6 million to one for her right eye, and 10-to-the-15th-power to one for her left eye.
National Geographic accepted and published this conclusion in a second cover issue featuring Sharbat Gula, 18 years after the first, and the Society launched their "Afghan Girl's Fund" to assist the education of Muslim girls in cultures that discourage or prohibit female education.