Appeal No. 1997-1604
Application No. 08/273,688
Concerning the Section 112, first paragraph, rejection,
the examiner’s nonenablement position relates to the claim 15
phrase “settling or compaction stabilizer” (and
correspondingly to the acronym “LMA/MAA” on page 36 of the
subject specification) as well as to the claim 16 phrase
“inverting surfactant.” As explained by the appellants in
their Brief, however, the aforequoted recitation criticized in
the rejection under review would not prevent one ordinarily
skilled in this art from practicing the here claimed invention
as the examiner seems to believe. Indeed, the criticized
terms are common in this art as reflected by, for example, the
Scanley and Mallya references applied by the examiner in the
rejections discussed below.
It follows that the examiner’s Section 112, first
paragraph, rejection of claims 15 and 16 cannot be sustained.
The Section 102 and Section 103 rejections over Scanley
of method claims 1 through 11 and 15 through 17 also cannot be
sustained. Each of these claims requires the step of removing
some portion of hydrophobic liquid from a starting composition
in a first centrifuge, thereby producing a pourable
concentrated polymer/emulsifying surfactant/hydrophobic liquid
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