Appeal No. 1999-0117
Application 08/702,948
to make any change thereto. Although we believe our original
decision adequately treats all the points raised by appellant in
the request for rehearing, we add the following comments for
emphasis.
Throughout the request, appellant criticizes our decision
for its alleged failure to take into account “the role of the
artisan in determining compliance [with the descriptive support
requirement of the first paragraph of § 112]” (request, page 3).
According to appellant, the disclosure in the present application
of tapered ends in the drawings, coupled with appellant’s
disclosure of the purpose of the distal ends as being to allow
easy entry into the hole in the bone tissue, and the “presumed
knowledge of a person skilled in the art of patents describing
implants with flat distal ends that allow easy entry into holes”
(request, page 5), would have conveyed to the artisan that
“reasonable variations” of the embodiments of Figs. 6
and 7 [e.g., claimed distal end configurations #3 and
#4] are also embodiments of appellant’s invention and
were in the possession of the appellant at the time of
filing of the application, even though there is an
“absence of literal support in the specification for
the claim language.” [Request, page 6.]
Our difficulty with this argument is that it requires
considerable speculation on our part of matters such as the
presumed knowledge of the ordinarily skilled artisan, how the
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