Her family moved from Russian Turkestan to South Carolina when she was a small child, and Lubchenco's higher education and career were spent almost entirely in Colorado.
Lubchenco was among the early physicians to suspect a link between oxygen administration and the eye condition that became known as retinopathy of prematurity.
Portia Lubchenco met her husband Alexis, a Russian agronomist, when he came to the United States to learn to grow cotton.
[1] In 1930, when the boll weevil damaged the family's crops, they moved to Northeast Colorado, where Lubchenco graduated from high school.
[1] By 1950, Lubchenco noted that a high percentage of her former preterm patients were developing blindness from an eye condition known as retrolental fibroplasia (RLF), which was later renamed retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).
Her work led to the popularization of the term low birth weight, which underscored the fact that such babies may or may not have been born early.