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development of shaped charges and slurry explosives. Cook was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Born on October 10, 1911, in Garden City, Utah to Alonzo Laker Cook and Maude Osmond, he received a Master of Arts from the University of Utah in 1934 and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Yale University in 1937. He served as President of IRECO Chemicals (later acquired by Dyno Nobel). He also served as a professor of metallurgy and mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He died on October 12, 2000, in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was related to the Osmond Family.

His son, Merrill Cook, is a Utah politician who served as a U.S. Representative from 1997 to 2001.

His career (which lasted over 50 years) in theoretical and practical explosives spans some remarkable achievements. As an expert in explosives, Melvin was an investigator of the 1947 fertilizer explosion in Texas City, Texas. The Texas City Disaster is considered the worst industrial accident in United States history. In December 1956, he created a new blasting agent using a mixture of ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder and fuel oil, which was an unusual mixture at the time. This explosive, the first of the so-called "slurry explosives" was remarkably safe. He did consulting work for the Iron Ore Company of Canada, where the aluminized ammonium nitrate slurry explosive (with water) he developed was successfully used. His work on slurry explosives paved the way for the development of the BLU-82, nicknamed the "Daisy Cutter" (because of its use in Vietnam to clear helicopter landing zones), one of the largest and most powerful conventional bombs in the U.S. military inventory, using aluminized slurry.

For his work in discovering slurry explosives, Cook received a Nitro Nobel Gold Medal in 1968, only the second time the award had been given (and which has been awarded only once since). This award has sometimes been confused with the Nobel Prize conferred by the Nobel Foundation, but although it is given by the successor explosives company founded by Alfred Nobel, Nitro-Nobel AB (now a part of Dyno Nobel), it is not of the same stature or importance as the Nobel Prize.