Appeal No. 1999-1942
Application 08/770,037
cure the deficiencies of Foster, Penneck, and the APA and,
consequently, the rejection of claim 19 is reversed.
(2)
Although we have concluded that the Examiner did not
establish a prima facie case of obviousness, and have reversed
the rejections, we comment that the examples in the
specification as summarized in Appendix B to the brief,
establish unexpected or synergistic results for the reasons
discussed by Appellants in the brief (Br16-22, particularly
the comparisons at Br19-20). For example, as discussed by
Appellants (Br19), Example #1 has 13 layers of "U" (unfilled
resin binder) and a normalized life of 1.0. Example #2 has 10
layers of "A" (resin binder with a dispersion of 12% alumina)
with a life of 3.21 times that of Example #1. One would
expect that Example #3, having 5 layers of "A" and 5 layers of
"U," would have a life intermediate that of Examples #1 and
#2. However, in fact, it has over double the life, plainly
establishing an unexpected result. The Examiner has failed to
deal with these results.
The Examiner argues that Appellants have not discussed
the "statistical significance" of the experimental results
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