Biography

British botanist from Birmingham. As a student and research assistant of J.G. Hawkes, Richard Neville Lester participated on potato collecting expeditions to Central America and Mexico. After obtaining his PhD in 1962 for his "Immunochemical studies of the genus Solanum", he continued work on the immunotaxonomy of plants at the University of Texas in Austin, and then at the University of Kansas, where he also applied these techniques to fungi and bats. In 1968-1969, he spent a year in Uganda as a lecturer in botany at Makerere University College, and there became interested in African eggplant species, wild and cultivated, on which he focused his research for the rest of his career.

For more than 30 years he was a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, where he taught on the Master's course introduced by J.G. Hawkes, 'Conservation and Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources'. He was also involved in teaching the practical aspects of collecting and conserving plant genetic resources on short courses in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Spain. His collections in Uganda and on subsequent IPGRI collecting trips to Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, augmented by contributions from his many graduate students, resulted in hundreds of accessions to the Birmingham Solanaceae collection.

He was the author of 135 publications, most of them on various aspects of the Solanaceae, his specialities Solanum melongena L., S. aethiopicum L. in particular. One of his more theoretical papers, a personal favourite entitled "Evolution under domestication involving disturbance of genetic balance", published in Euphytica in 1989, put forth the argument that domesticated traits, which most often are recessive, result from the loss of gene function rather than the acquisition of new functions. He was co-organiser with J.G. Hawkes and A.D. Skelding of the first International Solanaceae Conference in 1976 and a loyal contributor to all subsequent conferences, editor of the Solanaceae Newsletter (1977-1979) and from 1993 to 1996 coordinator of the European Solanaceae Information Network (ESIN), a pioneering database that integrated molecular data with a taxonomic reference system.

Despite being diagnosed with a life-threatening cancer soon after his retirement in 2000, he continued to be very active. As coordinator of EGGNET from 2000 to 2005, he oversaw the transfer of the endangered Solanaceae collection at Birmingham to Nijmegen Botanical Garden (Netherlands), INRA Montfavet (France), and Valencia Polytechnic University (Spain). Before his death, he managed to complete a conspectus of Solanum with co-author Alan Child, but not, unfortunately, the taxonomic revision of all African Solanum species, which he had started in the 1980s with his student P. Jaeger. He is commemorated in the tuber-bearing species Solanum lesteri Hawkes & Hjert.

Sources:
M.-C. Daunay, 2006, "In Memory of Richard Neville lester", Solanaceae Newsletter, 10: 2
M.-C. Daunay and G.M. van der Weerden, 2006, "Plants, Solanaceae and Solanum Species: the Lifelong Passions of Richard Neville Lester (13 June 1937-4 April 2006)", Acta Horticulturae, 745: 539-549.