Born in Wujin County, Changzhou Municipality, Jiangsu Province, eastern China, Rukang Wu (also known as Woo Ju-Kang before 1967) received a B.A. from the National Central University (then at Chongqing) in 1940. After graduation, he worked with Dingliang Wu (1894–1969) (also known as Woo Ting-Lian before 1967) in the section of Anthropology of the National Research Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (then at Kunming, Yunnan Province), where they conducted studies on extant human skeleton and a number of field survey on different ethnic groups in Guizhou Province. In 1941, he published his first scientific article in a journal of Academia Sinica, the study of axes and the atlas of modern Chinese. Near the end of 1946, Rukang Wu left for the United States where he earned a doctoral degree under the supervision of Mildred Trotter at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri. He spent the summer of 1948 studying...