Appeal No. 1998-2551 Page 15 Application No. 08/787,624 Altman. The appellant has not provided any argument as to why the rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 103 before us in this appeal based upon the combined teachings of Hong, Altman and Eschenbach is in error. Second, it is our view that the examiner's rejection of claim 48 is not based on hindsight knowledge derived from the appellant's own disclosure but from the teachings of the applied prior art to one of ordinary skill in the art. We note that while there must be some teaching, reason, suggestion, or motivation to combine existing elements to produce the claimed device, it is not necessary that the cited references or prior art specifically suggest making the combination (see B.F. Goodrich Co. v. Aircraft Braking Systems Corp., 72 F.3d 1577, 1583, 37 USPQ2d 1314, 1319 (Fed. Cir. 1996) and In re Nilssen, 851 F.2d 1401, 1403, 7 USPQ2d 1500, 1502 (Fed. Cir. 1988)) as the appellants would apparently have us believe. Rather, as set forth previously the test for obviousness is what the combined teachings of the references would have suggested to one of ordinary skill in the art. Additionally, we observe that an artisan must be presumed toPage: Previous 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007