It has been a hell of journey from a 17-year-old laboratory technician in New Zealand prodding away at snags and minced meat to becoming an integral part of the pioneering proteomics group at Macquarie University's Advanced Proteomics Analysis Facility, but that is the journey taken over less than two decades by Ben Herbert.

Now the director of the Proteomics Technology Centre of Expertise at the University of Technology, Sydney, Herbert is one of the Australia's leading experts in isoelectric focusing and 2D electrophoresis.

It certainly didn't start out that way. Herbert initially did a certificate in chemistry through Christchurch Polytechnic and was content enough as a laboratory analyst doing chemical analysis of fat content, water content and preservatives in food for NZ's then Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. A colleague by the name of Jeff Plowman, who is now with AgResearch, had a PhD in protein chemistry and was interested in doing species determination in food.

"I got to do some work with him as a technician and ultimately went onto that within a fairly short time, doing antibody-antigen tests for species in meat and then looking at isoelectric focusing to look at species in fish," he says. "We built up a big collection of fish from all of the different commercial species in New Zealand. That was fascinating stuff to me because I was 17 years old and it beat the hell out of testing fat in sausages. That was the real start for me in doing protein extractions and separations."

Herbert moved on to work with NZ's Wool Research Organisation, which allowed him to do a university diploma, where he worked with a small cell biology group looking at the strength of wool fibres. Here, amongst a lot of molecular biology, he started doing protein chemistry - generating one- and then two-dimensional electrophoresis of wool proteins.

"We bought the first system in New Zealand to do 2D gels with immobilised pH gradients (IPGs)," he says. "That was a big deal at the time and we published the first paper anyone ever did on 2D gels and wool proteins using IPGs."

That research took up five years, but in the meantime he had popped over to Australia for a workshop on protein chemistry at Macquarie University, where he just happened to meet Professor Keith Williams and his now very well-known group, which pioneered proteomics research in Australia. This group, including Andrew Gooley, Nicki Packer, Brad Walsh and Mark Molloy, amongst others, were surprised to find that the young Kiwi was quite comfortable running 2D gels, which they perceived to be reasonably difficult.

He ended up running a few workshops on 2D gels for Macquarie and was then invited to come over permanently to do his PhD. This was in 1995, when the Macquarie group was organising and lobbying for funds for what was to become the Australian Proteomics Analysis Facility (APAF), the first of its kind in Australia.