Appeal No. 2000-0178
Application 08/686,630
Appellants assert in both their brief and reply brief that
because Nazmy (col. 1, lines 26-30) and their own specification
(pages 2-4) warn about the low ductility and thus brittleness of
intermetallic materials, one skilled in the art at the time of
their invention would not have processed an intermetallic
material with a peening process (e.g., either shot peening or
laser shock peening), because the brittle intermetallic material
would have been viewed as being subject to breaking, shattering
or other damage as a result of such processing. Accordingly,
appellants argue that, absent hindsight provided by their own
disclosure, one skilled in the art would not have combined the
applied references as done by the examiner because the prior art
clearly teaches away from any such combination.
Appellants further contend that none of the applied
references even hint at laser shock peened articles made of
intermetallic materials and that the examiner has implied and
inferred results which are directly opposed to what is taught by
the prior art when taken as a whole. In this regard, appellants
(reply brief, page 3) attack the examiner’s position that it
would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art to
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