The history of the Michael Sars Centre

In the early 1990s, an evaluation of aquaculture research showed that Norway needed more basic research on marine organisms using molecular biology. At the same time, the gene technology committee of the Research Council of Norway recognized what EMBL — the European Molecular Biology Laboratory — had done for the field in its host countries.

The Michael Sars Centre was established in 1997. Start-up funding was granted in 1996 by the Research Council of Norway, the Ministry of Education and Research and the University of Bergen, and was used to recruit five research groups that were running from 1999.

In 2003 the Michael Sars Centre was awarded one of the few partnerships EMBL has granted. It brought ten years of funding from the Research Council of Norway, with a gradually increasing contribution from the University of Bergen, which allowed the Centre to grow to eight research groups.

The Centre then received another ten years of funding from the same sources for the period 2013–2022. Today it hosts six full research groups, together with one associated group from the University of Bergen.

The Centre was originally placed within the research foundation UNIFOB, controlled by the University of Bergen and later turned into Uni Research AS. In 2015 the Michael Sars Centre was integrated into the university, but placed outside the faculties and reporting to the rector through its own board. Since 1 January 2023 the Centre has been part of the Faculty of Science and Technology.

The Centre is located in the High Technology Centre at Marineholmen, together with several other research communities from the same faculty. As at EMBL, group leaders at the Centre receive funding and access to strong infrastructure for a limited period — six years with the possibility of four more.

Michael Sars (1805–1869) was a marine biologist from Bergen and the most important Norwegian naturalist of the first half of the nineteenth century. He described more than 200 marine species collected in the fjords around the city, and laid the foundation for Norway's strong tradition in marine research.

In 1835 he described for the first time the complete life cycle of a scyphozoan jellyfish. In 1865 he published a description of a species found at a depth of 550 metres in Lofoten. Together with a similar find by the naturalist Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, this showed that life existed deeper than scientists had assumed, and helped prompt the famous Challenger expedition.

Sars was appointed extraordinary professor of zoology in 1854 and a knight of the Order of St Olav in 1856. He held honorary doctorates from the universities of Zurich and Berlin and was elected to more than 20 learned societies in Europe and the United States. Five genera are named after him, among them the jellyfish Sarsia and the alga Michaelsarsia.