Appeal No. 2001-1504
Application 08/618,263
brief), the examiner’s determination that a person of ordinary
skill in the art would have appreciated the laminated jaw
structure disclosed by Emmett as affording strength and
stability. On its face, this appreciation would have
furnished such a person with the requisite motivation or
suggestion to make Lance’s jaws of a laminated construction.
As accurately noted by the appellant (see page 10 in the main
brief), neither Lance nor Emmett meets the limitations in
claim 16 requiring a recess defined by the outer laminae of
the stationary jaw and a flat portion defined by the inner
laminae of the movable jaw. The test for obviousness,
however, is not whether the features of a secondary reference
may be bodily incorporated into the structure of the primary
reference; nor is it that the claimed invention must be
expressly suggested in any one or all of the references.
Rather, the test is what the combined teachings of the
references would have
suggested to those of ordinary skill in the art. In re
Keller, 642 F.2d 413, 425, 208 USPQ 871, 881 (CCPA 1981). In
other words, non-obviousness cannot be established by
attacking references individually where the rejection is based
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