Appeal No. 2002-0515
Application No. 09/222,092
the Examiner’s rejection, Brief, page 9, does not address the suitability of the various
arrangement of the filters and lens as asserted by the Examiner.
The Examiner rejected claims 16 and 17 as unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a) as
obvious over DeVries and Barrera. We select claim 16 as representative.
Appellants argue that Barrera does not indicate that the benzocyclobutene moiety of
DeVries was unnecessary for the evaluation of a coating. (Brief, p. 10). The subject matter
of claim 16 specifies the binder contains a polyisocyanate based material. According to the
Examiner, Answer pages 8-9, Barrera provides evidence that polyisocyanate compounds are
a source of measurable fluorescence. We agree with the Examiner’s determination that it
would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art to use polyisocyanate
compounds in the method of DeVries as a source of detectable fluorescence. “The test for
obviousness is not whether the features of a secondary reference may be bodily incorporated
into the structure of the primary reference.... Rather, the test is what the combined teachings
of those 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).
Based on our consideration of the totality of the record before us, having evaluated
the prima facie case of obviousness in view of Appellants’ arguments, we conclude that the
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