Appeal No. 1997-1861
Application No. 08/412,235
OPINION
We have carefully reviewed the respective positions
presented by appellant and the examiner. In so doing, we find
ourselves in agreement with appellant that the applied prior
art fails to establish a prima facie case of obviousness of
the claimed subject matter. Accordingly, we will not sustain
the examiner's rejection for essentially those reasons
advanced by appellant, and we add the following primarily for
emphasis.
The examiner (answer, page 5) acknowledges that Schmidt
does not teach “ . . . measurement of lead in blood, or use of
resonant laser ablation” as required by all of the appealed
claims herein. Nevertheless, the examiner contends that
[i]t would have been obvious to one of ordinary
skill in the art at the time the invention was made
to use the Schmidt et al. method to measure lead in
blood because it is generally known to measure lead
in blood as shown by Omenetto et al. and because of
the Schmidt et al. method detection sensitivity. If
one were not concerned with the time required to
analyze a single sample, it would have been obvious
to one of ordinary skill in the art . . . to measure
the sample to exhaustion because one of ordinary
skill in the art would have recognized that a
statistical distribution of analysis sites per
sample is a time saving measure which is used to
analyze a sample without using the whole sample when
the concentration of the analyte is expected to be
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