Philip Morrison describes the origins of the paper that he co-wrote with Giuseppe Cocconi, "Searching for Interstellar Communications"

Morrison:

Yes. Well, gamma ray astronomy arose out of the fact that Bob Wilson at Cornell was building a good, nice new electron synchrotron with which he was able to make high-energy gamma rays. And so they were all the talk, and we tried to calculate how far they would go and so on. And Cocconi came to me one day — I’ve often reported this — and said, "You know what, Phil? If there are people out there, won’t they communicate with gamma rays that'll cross the whole galaxy?" And I said, “Gee, I know nothing about that. They will cross the galaxy. It’s very thin in hydrogen. But not all that well. There will be some loss." "What about radio?" he said. "I don’t know much about radio, but I understand there is a lot of radio out there. Why not use radio? It’s much cheaper. You get many more photons per watt and that must be what counts." And we began working on that and pretty soon we knew enough about radio astronomy to publish a paper called, as you say —

Gingerich:

"Searching for Interstellar Communications."

Morrison:

"Searching for Interstellar Communications," yes. Which of course is not yet SETI, but it's a much better name. SETI has always made me unhappy because it somehow denigrates the situation. It wasn’t the intelligence we could detect; it was the communications we could detect. Yes, they imply intelligence, but that's so evident that it’s better to talk about getting signals from them, not just telepathy, you know, that sort of argument.