Interference 102,760
expect that the invention will work for conception to be
complete. Burroughs Wellcome Co. v. Barr Lab., Inc., 40 F.3d
at 1228-1229, 32 USPQ2d at 1919-1920. This is not to say that
an inventor can never conceive of a patentable invention in an
unpredictable or experimental field, such as the field of
pharmaceutical therapy for treating sleep apneas, without
reduction to practice, Id. at 1228, 32 USPQ2d at 1920, but it
is not necessary for an inventor to reasonably expect success
to establish conception of the invention defined by an
interference count. However, to patent a claimed method of
administering an amount of a pharmaceutical agent effective
for treatment in the unpredictable art of treating sleep
apneas, the patent applicant’s specification must enable one
skilled in the art to practice the full scope of the
therapeutic method claimed without undue experimentation at
the time the application was filed. Persons skilled in the
art at the time of Dement’s conception may very well have
believed that success in practicing a therapeutic method for
treating sleep apneas was so unpredictable that the ordinary
or conventional kind of experimentation required to determine
an effective amount of a single drug from a list of
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