Appeal No. 2002-1001
Application No. 09/202,906
or in the accompanying specification. Rather, the appellants’
principal argument in this appeal is that one skilled in the
relevant art would understand from reading the present
specification that the recited molecular weight values are Mw
values. (Appeal brief filed Jun. 29, 2001, paper 16, page 3;
reply brief filed Jan. 24, 2002, paper 19, pages 1-4.) In
support of their position, the appellants refer us to the
description of Examples 1 and 2 in the specification.
We find the appellants’ position to be without merit. The
appellants are correct in pointing out (appeal brief, page 3)
that polypropylene glycol having an unspecified average
molecular weight of 400 is used in the examples of the present
specification as a starting material in the synthesis of the
claimed polymer. (Specification, page 5, lines 8-11.) The
appellants are also correct in stating that Aldrich quantifies
the Mw of a commercial polyethylene glycol identified by Aldrich
catalog number 20,239-8 as 400. However, these facts are
woefully insufficient to establish that the molecular weight
value recited in the specification examples for polypropylene
glycol is an Mw value, much less establish that the values
recited for the claimed polymer are Mw values. To begin,
polypropylene glycol is not the same as polyethylene glycol.
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