Appeal No. 96-1957
Application 07/423,472
The references relied on by the examiner are:
Elliot et al. (Elliot) 4,063,877 Dec. 20, 1977
Teutelink 2 031 469 Apr. 23, 1980
(published United Kingdom Pat. Application)
The examiner has rejected claims 1, 4 through 18 and 21 through 39 on appeal under 35
U.S.C. § 103 as being unpatentable over Teutelink in view of Elliot. We reverse.
Rather than reiterate the respective positions advanced by the examiner and appellant, we
refer to the examiner’s answer and to appellant’s main and reply briefs for a complete exposition
thereof.
Opinion
The issue in this appeal is whether the combination of references applied by the examiner
(answer, pages 3-4) would have placed the step of pretreating keratin fibres by contacting them
with an alkaline solution of an amphoteric surfactant prior to dyeing these fibers in an acidic dye
medium within the ordinary skill in this art. Upon carefully reviewing the record, we must agree
with appellant that the examiner has not satisfied his burden of establishing a prima facie case of
obviousness with respect to this issue by showing that some objective teachings or suggestions in
the prior art taken as a whole or that knowledge generally available to one of ordinary skill in the
art would have led that person to combine the relevant teachings of the applied references in the
proposed manner to arrive at the claimed invention without recourse to the teachings in
appellant's disclosure. See generally In re Dow Chemical, 837 F.2d 469, 473, 5 USPQ2d
1529, 1531-32 (Fed. Cir. 1988); In re Fine, 837 F.2d 1071, 1074-76, 5 USPQ2d 1596, 1598-
1600 (Fed. Cir. 1988).
It is known in the prior art that an amphoteric surfactant can be added directly to a dye
containing acid bath to dye keratin (wool) fibers in the same manner as nonionic, anionic and
cationic surfactants as admitted by appellant (specification, paragraph bridging pages 1-2). In a
modification of this process, Elliot discloses that where the wool fiber has a cationic charge on the
fiber from treatment with a resin (e.g., col. 1, lines 20-21), a pretreatment with an amphoteric
surfactant auxiliary product at a pH of between 6 and 6.25 produces a temporary partial blocking
of that cationic charge which amphoteric surfactant auxiliary product is then replaced by a
dyestuff molecule during dyeing from an acid bath (e.g., col. 1, lines 39-42, and col. 18, lines 11-
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