Appeal No. 1996-2943
Application No. 08/229,648
have been motivated by the desire to obtain a lower-cost
composition while still retaining a degree of, albeit reduced,
biocidal activity. According to the appellants, this is
because the reduced, biocidal activity resulting from this
elimination would require a greater quantity of composition in
order to provide equivalent biocidal activity thus negativing
the “lower-cost” of the modified composition.
The deficiency of the appellants’ foregoing analysis is
that it presumes that all of the methods envisioned by Oakes
require “equivalent biocidal activity” (request, page 4).
Plainly, this presumption is not well taken. The degree of
biocidal activity required by a given method depends upon the
degree of initial biological contamination in combination with
the degree of sanitation necessary for the product being
clean. It follows that a lesser degree of biocidal activity
would be required by a method of cleaning items which have
little if any biological contamination and/or which are to be
used for purposes that do not demand complete sterilization of
the items. We therefore maintain our conclusion that it would
have been obvious to eliminate the above discussed component
from Oakes’ composition in order to reduce the cost thereof
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