Dr. Swift attended NYU Medical School, where he made his first scientific discovery during his freshman year; the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published his report. After internal medical residency (Columbia Presbyterian; NYU Bellevue) he spent three years at NYU doing independent laboratory electrophysiology and cell culture research.
He entered cancer genetics after his presentation at NYU Medical Grand Rounds describing a radical new way to analyzes genes predisposing to cancer was enthusiastically received. Both the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute were eager to fund the practical proposal for testing this idea. The successful completion of this initial project led to a major article in Nature (1971), the leading scientific publication then and now. However, his next project, analyzing the effect of the ataxia-telangiectasia (A T) gene on cancer incidence, yielded the most significant impact on cancer genetics to date.
In 1972, he became an Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here, he was later appointed Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology and taught the first course anywhere on the topic of the genetics of common diseases. In 1986, he visited laboratories in Japan for three weeks as a guest of the government. From 1992 through 2001, he was a Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine at New York Medical College in Westchester, New York.
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