Giuseppe Cocconi, who co-wrote the paper that is considered the start
of the modern SETI era, died on November 9 (Carl Sagan's birthday,
ironically enough) at age 94.

His bio from CERN is here:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1142555

In 1959, Cocconi along with Philip Morrison (who narrated the short film
The Powers of Ten among other things) wrote a paper for Nature on
searching for radio signals from alien intelligences, especially along the
hydrogen line (1420 megahertz) region of the radio spectrum, where it
is relatively quiet. Since it was assumed anyone with enough knowledge
about astronomy and the right technology would know this universal
fact as well, the "Water Hole" as it was called could be a good place to
make such a signal obvious anywhere in the galaxy.

You can see and read the original paper here:

http://www.coseti.org/morris_0.htm

According to this history, Cocconi first came to Morrison with the idea
that ETI might use gamma rays to signal others across space:

http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/seti/seti_history_02.html

The final quote in their Nature paper still says it best about SETI:

"The reader may seek to consign these speculations wholly to the domain of science-fiction. We submit, rather, that the foregoing line of argument demonstrates that the presence of interstellar signals is entirely consistent with all we now know, and that if signals are present the means of detecting them is now at hand. Few will deny the profound importance, practical and philosophical, which the detection of interstellar communications would have. We therefore feel that a discriminating search for signals deserves a considerable effort. The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero."