Before his sad death from cancer in April 2006, Richard Lester (Birmingham) was working with the team at BM to finalise his 'magnum opus' on the Solanum of Africa, in collaboration with Peter Jaeger (a graduate student of Richard's in the 1970s). Richard had travelled widely in Europe examining types in the last few years, and in 2005 he annotated and worked with many of the NHM collections. The group at BM (mainly Knapp and Bennett, working with Jennifer Edmonds of Leeds) will bring his work on African Solanum to completion as part of the PBI project.
An obituary can be found on the Botanical Garden of Nijmegen Web site (http://www.bgard.science.ru.nl/)
