Appeal No. 94-4307
Application 07/919,267
or suggested by the Japanese reference relied upon by the
examiner. We find that the examiner has not made out a prima
facie case of obviousness over the prior art. Accordingly, the
examiner’s rejection of claims 1-12 under 35 U.S.C. § 103 is
reversed.
Rejection Under 35 U.S.C. § 112
The examiner rejected claim 10 on the ground that the
expression “ascorbic acid is substantially absent from said
aqueous solution” does not have descriptive support in the
specification as originally filed. Appellants argue that support
for the expression can be found at page 1, lines 12-19 of the
specification wherein appellants state that
[t]he present inventors have formerly found that, when
[a] negatively-charged substance (e.g. fruit juice and
anionic surface active agent) is present in aqueous
solution of thaumatin, precipitates are formed and that
it is effective to use chitosan for preventing such
precipitation and also to use ascorbic acid and
chitosan together for preventing unpleasant after-taste
of aqueous solution of thaumatin (cf. Japanese Laid-
Open Publication 02/174,649).
According to appellants, this disclosure plus the discussion of
the invention in the specification coupled with the fact that
none of the examples in their specification include ascorbic acid
“establishes that [the] absence of ascorbic acid, from the
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