Appeal No. 2001-1693 Page 6
Application No. 09/168,099
by reactions (c) and (d) in Table I of Reusser.2 Analogously, contrary to the belief
reflected by the appellants' argument, appealed independent claim 2 does not exclude
"employing an excess of ethene" and does not require "only equimolar amounts of
ethene." Id., at page 12.
Additionally, the appellants present the following argument on page 13 of the
Brief:
Although it could be said that optimizing the yield of propylene in a
metathesis reaction was generally motivated in the prior art by economic
considerations, there is nothing in the references of record to provide a
suggestion, or to motivate one of ordinary skill in the relevant art, to select
the various aspects of the references relied on to result in an integrated
process as here claimed to give exactly that desired result.
This argument also is unpersuasive. Again, it is appropriate to clarify that the
independent claim under review does not contain any limitation regarding propylene
yield as the appellants implicitly suggest in the argument under review. We simply
disagree with the appellants' contention regarding suggestion and motivation. For the
reasons previously mentioned, an artisan with ordinary skill would have been motivated
to combine Reusser and Kelly in such a manner as to yield a process fully
corresponding to the here claimed process.
Concerning the separate prior art rejections of claims 5, 10, and 12, these
rejections have not been contested by the appellants with any reasonable specificity
(e.g., see page 15 of the Brief). That is, the appellants do not argue that the particular
2 More specifically, reaction (c) combines 2-butene with 1-butene to yield 2-
pentene and propene (which corresponds to the appellants' second argued reaction
system), and reaction (d) combines isobutene with 2-butene (which is distinguishable
from the 1-butene of the appellants' first argued but not claimed reaction system) to
yield 2-methyl-2-butene and propene.
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