Poultry science has entered a new era with the completion of a century of investigative studies in chicken genetics, sequencing of the chicken genome, application of genomic tools into systems biology studies, and rapid advances in the development of the statistical theory for application of molecular genetic information in commercial breeding programs. This perspectives paper sets the context for the accompanying series of reviews on chicken genetics and genomics, introduces important issues in the field of poultry molecular genetics, and briefly describes the topics of each of the reviews.