Appeal No. 96-1368
Application 08/080,891
need to seal the liquid crystal material from the environment.
Appellants have not specifically addressed the rejection
of claim 1 over Murty in view of De Vaan. The only rejections
they discuss that are based on Murty are the rejection of
dependent claims 2, 3, 5, and 11 over Murty in view of De Vaan
and Tatsuno (Brief at 8-9) and the rejection of dependent
claim 6 over Iwanaga in view of Murty, Rogers, and De Vaan
(Brief at 10-11). However, in discussing those claims
Appellants make one argument that is also applicable to
claim 1, which is that Murty's liquid crystal material "is not
polymerized [n]or is it uniaxially oriented" and that the De
Vaan patent fails to cure this deficiency because its wedge-
shaped elements are formed of glass rather than of an oriented
polymerized liquid crystal monomer (Brief at 9). This
argument fails because it is well settled that a rejection
based on a plurality of references cannot be overcome by
attacking the references individually; the test for combining
references is not what individual references themselves
suggest but rather what the combination of disclosures taken
as a whole would suggest to one of ordinary skill in the art.
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