Appeal No. 2001-0611
Application No. 08/742,733
ordinarily skilled artisan, as we must, said artisan would not
combine the teachings of the references together in a manner that
would defeat the very purpose of the primary reference.
The argument that Moumene does not suggest the claim 44
limitation of glass fibers comprising 10% of the implant by
volume (main brief, sentence spanning pages 5-6), and the
argument that Bokros does not suggest the claim 16 limitation of
interstices between nonembedded portions of the coils ranging
from 150 to 200 micrometers (main brief, page 6) are noted.
Since these limitations do not appear in representative claim 11,
they are not persuasive that the examiner erred in so rejecting
this claim. In re Self, 671 F.2d at 1348, 213 USPQ at 5. In any
event, the applied prior art indicates that these parameters are
known to be result effective.1 In our view, it would have been
well within the skill of the artisan, at the time the appellants’
invention was made, to ascertain from routine experimentation an
appropriate percentage of glass fiber reinforcement and an
appropriate amount of spring overlap and interleaving to achieve
1 See, for example, column 7, lines 34-38, of Moumene where it is stated
that the short fiber volume ratio may varied to fine tune rigidity and
strength of the final product, and column 3, lines 7-14, of Bokros where it is
indicated that the amount of overlap and interleaving of adjacent springs may
be changed to achieve the desired porosity.
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