Appeal No. 96-2865
Application No. 08/081,561
that the inventors had possession at that time of the later
claimed subject matter, rather than the presence or absence of
literal support in the specification for the claim language. In
re Kaslow, 707 F.2d 1366, 1375, 217 USPQ 1089, 1096 (Fed. Cir.
1983). The content of the drawings may also be considered in
determining compliance with the written description requirement.
Id.
According to the examiner, the appellant’s disclosure does
not provide clear support or antecedent basis for a number of
recitations in the appealed claims. A review of the appellants’
disclosure as originally filed, however, including the originally
filed claims and those portions of the specification highlighted
by the appellants in the main brief (pages 22 through 33),
indicates that the original disclosure would indeed reasonably
convey to the artisan that the appellants had possession at that
time of the subject matter now set forth in claims 1 through 41.
Insofar as the enablement requirement is concerned, the
dispositive issue is whether the appellants’ disclosure,
considering the level of ordinary skill in the art as of the date
of the appellants’ application, would have enabled a person of
such skill to make and use the appellants’ invention without
undue experimentation. In re Strahilevitz, 668 F.2d 1229, 1232,
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