Appeal No. 2002-0195
Application No. 09/174,977
amounts of the same five ingredients as broadly recited in claim 31
(Answer, page 2). The examiner further finds that the reference
fails to disclose the amount of moisture in the dry water-
attracting means but concludes that the claimed amount of moisture
would have been obvious in view of the teachings of Nakamura that
the package should be kept dry and the knowledge in the art that an
artisan would have kept the adsorbent dry at the start of the
process so that it did not become saturated (Answer, page 3).
Appellants acknowledge that claim 31 is directed to the
specific composition per se which forms a part of claim 30 (Brief,
page 14). However, appellants submit that claim 31 contains all of
the limitations of “the composition of claim 30" and thus the same
arguments with respect to claim 30 are equally applicable to claim
31 (id.).
Appellants are correct that the composition of claim 31
contains all the limitations of the composition as recited in the
improvement clause of claim 30. However, the scope of these two
claims are not the same, as discussed below and on pages 3-8 of our
decision in Appeal No. 1995-3770. As construed in our previous
decision in Appeal No. 1995-3770 and discussed by the examiner in
this appeal (Answer, pages 3-4), composition claim 30 merely
recites the five essential ingredients along with many statements
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