[1] Her father, Rudolph Wittenberg, was German Jewish, and her mother, Goldie Ray Polturak, was American.
[1] After completing her doctorate, Swan worked for insurance company Kaiser Permanente investigating links between the contraceptive pill and conditions such as cervical cancer.
She later worked for the California Department of Public Health, studying unexplained miscarriages in Santa Clara County.
Swan joined a National Academy of Sciences committee in 1995 to research the impact of "hormonally active agents in the environment" sperm counts between 1938 and 1991.
She has also researched the effects of environmental chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs on the development of the human reproductive tract.