Frank Drake

Frank Donald Drake (born May 28, 1930) is an American astronomer and astrophysicist. He is most notable as one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma, developing the Drake equation, and as the creator of the Arecibo Message, a digital encoding of an astronomical and biological description of the Earth and its lifeforms for transmission into the cosmos.

Early life and education

Born on May 28, 1930, in Chicago, Illinois, as a youth Drake loved electronics and chemistry. He reports that he considered the possibility of life existing on other planets as an eight-year-old, but never discussed the idea with his family or teachers due to the prevalent religious ideology.

He enrolled at Cornell University on a Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. Once there he began studying astronomy. His ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life were reinforced by a lecture from astrophysicist Otto Struve in 1951. After college, he served briefly as an electronics officer on the heavy cruiser USS Albany. He then went on to graduate school at Harvard to study radio astronomy.

Frank Drake (comics)

Frank Drake is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character appeared most notably in the Tomb of Dracula series created by Gerry Conway.

Frank Drake was a direct descendant of Count Dracula, resulting from one of Dracula's wives prior to him becoming a vampire. Over the generations, Frank's ancestors would eventually change their surname to Drake to remove themselves from the unwanted connotations of their ancestry.

Fictional character biography

Frank Drake is introduced as a millionaire playboy who had squandered his inheritance and now had nothing more than an ancestral castle in his assets. Planning to sell it, Drake and friends traveled to Transylvania where the castle was located. it was discovered that this was the castle of Count Dracula, though Drake never truly believed in the Dracula legends. Drake and his friends stumble across the skeleton of Dracula and accidentally resurrected him. Drake narrowly escaped death when Dracula recognized Drake as a descendant. Drake eventually relocated to London.