The International Symposium on Avian Endocrinology, 1977–2024: Past, present and future

The First International Symposium on Avian Endocrinology (ISAE) was held 47 years ago at the Grand Hotel in Kolkata (Calcutta), India. Professor Asok Ghosh organized and convened the symposium, and Professor Donald S. Farner was President. The 1977 ISAE was convened at a time when neuroendocrine cascades were emerging as major pathways by which environmental events are perceived and transduced resulting in endocrine secretions that then orchestrate life history stages. Methods to measure hormone concentrations in blood and other tissues were relatively recent allowing the advance of laboratory and field investigations to explore ecological bases of endocrine control systems. The rise of evolutionary endocrinology and theory in ecological contexts followed-topics that are flourishing today. Studies on poultry continue to play central roles at ISAE meetings. In recent decades, the incorporation of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenetics and other technologies provide us with an unprecedented array of tools to explore endocrinological processes at mechanistic levels we could never have dreamed of in 1977. The future looks to be an era of major advances in neuroendocrinology. What technologies will arise and transform our knowledge further? Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a tool in avian endocrinology in at least research on endocrine disrupting chemicals. Will AI facilitate new advances and research directions across the field? The future of basic research has never been brighter than it is now. As in the past, ISAEs in the next decades will integrate new discoveries across environmental and applied biology. New challenges will doubtless appear.