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Milo Backus

Associate Editor, The Leading Edge

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Before Barbara met Milo, her life had been properly charted after the fashion of a young Bostonian in the early 1950s. His proposal for a life together included a move to Alaska to prospect for uranium. "Where would we live?" she asked with more logical concern than was called for. "In a tent!" blurted Milo, brows raised on explaining the obvious. "Meeting Milo was very inconvenient for my plans," says Barbara Backus as a matter of fact, "but he was and is unique, possessed with a wonderful sense of humor, and I just couldn't turn him down."

After forfeiting an early ambition to become a radio announcer, Backus was pursuing a degree in geochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For his thesis work he set out to figure out all the difficulties of using potassium calcium in determining the age of rocks. Milo is probably the only one ever to succeed at potassium-calcium dating, a fact that denotes his lack of concern for the gainful application of his knowledge. Lucky for Barbara, Geophysical Service Inc's on-campus recruiting and summer program for graduate students stood between her and a Call of the Wild lifestyle ... perhaps.

"Relative to its potential, geophysical technology remains in a state of suspended immaturity." (Backus, TLE September 1986). "That is still true; more so now, because you can see more potential in the huge amount of information in most 3-D data sets ... and only a tiny part of it is extracted." (Backus, 2000) —Milo Backus

Milo and his lab partner at MIT, Larry Strickland, who was working on the more practicable potassium-argon branch of the decay, were both recruited despite the fact that neither had had any contact with seismology between graduation in 1952 and their doctoral dissertations in 1956. (Brother George Backus . . . [Full Text of this Article]