Appeal No. 1996-1154
Application No. 08/174,497
over Asai in view of Green and Dale as applied to claims 1
through 8 and 10, and further in view of Celio.
We have carefully reviewed the specification, claims and
applied prior art, including all of the arguments advanced by
the examiner and appellants. This review leads us to conclude
that the examiner’s § 103 rejections are not well founded.
Accordingly, we reverse each of the foregoing rejections. Our
reasons for this determination follow.
The examiner’s § 103 rejections are flawed in at least
two aspects. First, none of the references relied upon by the
examiner, either individually or in combination, would have
suggested employing the multi-stage reactor-separator of the
type described in Dale in a crude silver nitrate purification
process. Specifically, the examiner has not demonstrated why
one of ordinary skill in the art would have found a
fermentation multi-stage reactor-separator for producing
ethanol to be compatible with and/or useful for the crude
silver nitrate purification process of Green and/or Asai. On
this record, the examiner simply fails to explain why the
different chemistries involved would not negate obviousness.
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